Tightrope Walking
by Aurorajaye
Summary: "Close your eyes for a second, and you're already dreaming: you're buried underground and they don't find you, or she's bound in some warehouse and you can't find her...All the times you almost lost everything." B&B react to their time apart, reunite.
1. Chapter 1

**AN: I own nothing, of course. I couldn't get this idea out of my head. And I'm spoiler-free, but then I read a spoiler-influenced fic, which in turn, spoiler-influenced my fic. I know it looks like Booth-OC right now, but please remember: Everything happens eventually!**

* * *

There's this thing that happens if you go too long without sleep. Close your eyes for a second, and you're already dreaming. BAM: you're buried underground and they don't find you, or she's bound in some warehouse and you can't find her. You're stuck on the ship rigged with explosives, or she's buried underground—only this time, someone is missing, so she's stuck there, in the ground, forever. All the times things almost went wrong. All the times you almost lost everything.

You want to jerk yourself awake, but part of you knows: you're on a mission. You're hidden on a rooftop or in some brush. Part of you knows it's a rifle in your grip, not Epps' hand. It's a trigger hooked around your finger, not her mother's earring. So you learn to open your eyes without moving. You learn to ease yourself out of the nightmares.

When there is a body in your arms, it's harder. It takes you a moment to remember that it isn't _her_. You clutch Kate, screaming, "Bones!" She probably thinks your nightmares are about finding mass graves of unidentified victims, wastelands of remains. Instead, you see a wide-eyed woman in a church. "I knew you wouldn't give up," she says as you turn your back—leaving her like everyone before you had.

* * *

Booth knew his experience of instant, hyper-realistic dreams wasn't uncommon. He'd had it in the past, and it was even mentioned in the official Ranger training, complete with a squinty name: "hypnagogic hallucination." Lack of sleep and stress were among the causes, and neither problem would be remedied anytime soon. He just had to deal, knowing he could be ambushed anytime he closed his eyes. He also knew he had to tell Kate the truth about the dreams, and about Bones. He owed her that much.

They were on leave, tucked away in a green zone hotel, having a few drinks. Booth suspected Kate would rather be out schmoozing and exploring, but he couldn't handle it right now. Being around combat left him hyper-sensitized. Even now, alone in their hotel room, he had instinctively placed them out of the sight lines from the window, with his back to the wall. Actually, Kate was glad they'd stayed in, too. When she was out, she got itchy. She'd see something or hear something and feel an urge to snap some pictures and start chasing the story. It was almost an addiction. Even now, she could smell a story. It was rolling off of him in waves.

When Kate had been placed with Booth's unit, she'd quickly realized he was a dream subject—the kind of guy who leapt off the page. Readers would fall in love with this guy: his sad eyes, steely jaw and steady hands. After following him around for a few months, she knew she was in trouble, because her readers weren't the only ones falling hard for Sergeant Major Seeley Joseph Booth. Kate had kept him at arm's length as long as she could—she didn't want to endanger her objectivity, or get romantically involved with a soldier. It was too risky. But Booth was like an emotional ninja, able to overcome her every reservation. How was it even possible?

Booth had talked her into a date, and on that date he had kissed her and she had forgotten all her misgivings. That was months ago, and Kate had never known she could feel like this: so safe and cherished. But some nights, just as they were drifting off, his grip would tighten, and Booth wasn't holding her. He was holding "Bones."

"J, why did you come back to the Army?" She tried to sound casual, using the nickname she'd developed for him once they started dating. (For some reason, he hated his first name. Calling him his last name didn't feel quite right, though, so she'd used his first and middle initials: SJ, or J for short.)

"Are you working, Ace?" Booth sounded wary, using her nickname from before they'd started dating. "You already asked me that question a long time ago."

"I know, I know: 'to serve my country and to save lives. They asked me to return, and I couldn't refuse.'"

"You have it memorized?"

Kate shrugged. "Professionally I didn't push it, but you weren't telling the truth." Booth's jaw tightened, so she quickly added, "not the whole truth."

Booth had come here planning to tell Kate everything, but now he was having second thoughts. He felt like a sample under a squint's microscope. "Well, how about you, Ace? Why are you here?"

"In college, while I was studying journalism, I saw a movie called 'Harrison's Flowers.' A journalist disappears in Yugoslavia during the Croatian War of Independence. His wife goes to find him, posing as a photojournalist." She watched his face darken as she spoke. The last thing she wanted was to have Booth push her away, but she couldn't lie. "What she finds is that in war, we want to make one side good, and the other side evil, but both sides are human: capable of the best and worst. It's a reporter's job to be honest, and to record it all—good and bad—so that we don't forget what we are capable of…"

"A movie?" he interrupted, laughing humorlessly. "You're living in a war zone, risking your life because of a damned movie? I was _there._"

"I know you were there. I've done my research," she snapped, and began to pace at the foot of the bed. "I'm not some stupid kid romanticizing the war, Seeley! I became a reporter because I wanted to understand people better, and I wanted to tell their stories. I think the more we try to understand each other, the harder it is to hurt and kill each other. And yes, eight years ago I was partly inspired to be an war correspondent by a 'damned movie,' but you know I've seen enough reality to be worth something." She been ran her hands through her red hair in frustration, stopped and crossed her arms. "I answered the question. Now you. And unlike _some people_, I promise not to mock your answer."

She'd sounded like Bones, talking about working to increase our understanding of humanity. He'd never noticed, before, how alike the two women were.

They didn't look alike. Kate was a few inches shorter and slender, lacking Bones' pinup-girl curves. She had warm brown eyes, pin-straight red hair down to her shoulders, and peaches-and-cream skin with a smattering of freckles. (She had to apply sunscreen constantly, and joked that she couldn't keep the sand out of it, creating "one hell of an exfoliant.") Kate was a lot more old-fashioned than Bones as far as sex, relationships and religion were concerned, and she was better at relating to people. She could get strangers laughing or telling their saddest stories in minutes.

Although Kate was expert at winning others' confidence, she was slow to let new people in completely. Her walls weren't as visible or formidable as Bones', but they were there. Like Bones, Kate usually wore her hair up in a ponytail or bun for work, and was at-home in a tank top, khakis and work boots. Both women were athletic and energetic. Actually, if Bones and Kate met, Booth thought they'd probably be friends. Both women were smart, sexy feminists with curiosity about what it meant to be human. He shook his head at the idea.

Booth didn't know where to begin. "You know about Yugoslavia? What else do you know?"

"I know your basic bio," Kate said. "Everything that comes up on Google or a Lexis-Nexis database search: your military background and honors, the near-sports-career, and your time with the FBI. I know about your role in certain high-profile cases like with Epps and the Grave Digger. I know about your work with Temperance Brennan. 'Bones.'"

Booth got a strange look on his face. "Yeah, we work with bones."

Kate laughed wryly at his misunderstanding of her words and noticed his use of the present tense. "No, I meant…that's what you called her, right? 'Bones?' It's in some of the profiles of you two as partners or her as a writer. You slipped, sometimes, and used it with the press."

"Well, it's not like it's a secret. It's…it's just what I call her."

"Were you two together?" His face looked guarded. "I'm asking as your girlfriend, not as a reporter."

"Frankly, I'm not sure which would be scarier. Look, it's hard to explain," he said. "Bones and I…we were never a couple. We never even had sex, but..." Booth sighed. "What I'm trying to say…it's the kind of thing you should never say to your girlfriend. 'Don't discuss exes.' That's just logic, right?"

"I thought you said she wasn't an ex?"

"She wasn't my girlfriend, but she was my partner for five years, and I thought… from the first day I met her, I thought she was…"

"The one?" He didn't say anything, but it was written on his face. "What changed your mind?" Kate asked.

Booth was silent a moment too long.

"Oh, I see," Kate said.

"No, you don't see. You don't. She…we…we're never going to be together. I tried, you know? I put myself out there, but she told me it could never happen, so I told her that I had to move on. She went to the Maluku Islands to study the origin of the species and discover new things about what it means to be human."

"And you came here to try to keep our soldiers alive."

"And innocent bystanders, yeah."

"Fuck. Deep down, I always knew that you would break my heart."

"What? Nobody's breaking anything."

"Maybe not today…" Kate's gut instinct was telling her to run—the same instinct had stopped them from driving down a street rigged with an IED a month ago. In the last year, it had also diverted her from a checkpoint, a cafe, and a market on days when they were hit by suicide bombers. Most of the guys in the unit trusted her gut now. They called her Miss Cleo or "Ouija," and she rolled her eyes at their superstition. She was probably just subconsciously noticing the nervousness of locals in-the-know. _But what about that smell in the air of the burning to come?_ Kate didn't really know or care where the twinges came from, but she followed them.

"Are you quoting Casablanca? You watch too many movies, Kate." And then Booth kissed her until the sinking feeling in her gut went away. He loved this woman. Not the way he loved Dr. Temperance Brennan—he doubted he _could_ ever love someone like he loved Bones—but maybe he could build a life with Kate. Maybe they could fall deeper in love and love each other for the rest of their lives. Maybe Booth and Brennan could be happy as partners or friends without being _together_.

Kate held her breath that night when they went to bed, not relaxing until she heard Booth's breathing shift when he drifted off to sleep normally. Booth did dream eventually, thought. He was back at the circus, looking up at the high wire. Bones was almost halfway across, but Kate was on the wire, too, standing in the way.

"Booth?" Brennan called out, looking confused.

"What do we do now?" Kate asked.

* * *

**AN- Way more OC than I'd planned for, but she kinda barged in and made herself at home. I like her! I want her out of B&B's _way_, but I like her. Next chapter will have less Kate and more Brennan. Feedback is appreciated.**


	2. Chapter 2

**AN- Please forgive me if I've butchered any physics concepts. We discussed them in some philosophy classes I took a million years ago. I brushed up on it using Wikipedia, which is a dicey prospect, but my story has laypeople discussing their understanding of the concepts, not the concepts as understood by physicists, so I figure it's all peachy, right? Don't worry, it's not as scary as this author's note makes it sound.**

* * *

One night, the crew is gathered at a local bar for drinks, and Daisy Wick muses, "What if you had stayed in D.C., Dr. Brennan? You would have missed all this!"

You respond that her question is irrelevant, as you _didn't _stay in Washington. An archeologists with an amateur interest in physics posits that there is a universe in which you stayed at the Jeffersonian.

"Still irrelevant," you tell him. "If we cannot observe such a universe, it does not exist."

But no one listens. They're all too busy talking about the Multiple Worlds Interpretation; the Schrödinger's Cat thought experiment (a cat is trapped in a sealed box with a devilish machine that may or may not kill him, and until the box is opened, the cat is both alive and dead); and Einstein's rejection of the Copenhagen interpretation, claiming that the quantum superposition of an unstable keg of gunpowder will eventually contain both exploded and unexploded components.

Your colleagues are using words like "spacetime" and "local reality."

You long to tell them that Einstein suspected some of the contradictions he witnessed were errors in his math; and that Schrödinger intended his cat analogy to be a reductio ad absurdum, not a real possibility. The cat in the closed box isn't both alive and dead. It is one or the other! Moreover, the thought experiment was posed in 1935, so regardless of whether the machine went off, the cat would definitely be dead by now.

But you hear a voice in your head, saying, "Everything happens eventually. All the stuff that you think never happens? It happens. You just gotta be ready for it."

In spite of your misgivings, you find yourself imagining a hundred different universes. You parents never left. Booth didn't step in front of a bullet in a karaoke bar. He really did die from that gunshot wound, and his funeral was real. You sailed away with Sully. You didn't find Booth before his air ran out. He never awoke from that coma. You never met Booth at all. Or you stayed in D.C. and made love with him—loved him. The last universe is the hardest to believe. It is the only one you cannot picture clearly.

You leave your colleagues at the bar. You seek out a computer, check your e-mail and see his name. He has sent you just one word, as always: "Marco."

* * *

Booth sat on the bed, Kate's laptop resting on his legs. He had a smile Kate didn't recognize: not his sexy smile or his charming smile. This one made him look like a little boy.

"E-mail from Dr. B? What's she say?"

"Nothing."

"Nothing?" Kate scoffed. "She's doing work that redefines the origin of the species, and her e-mail says nothing? The woman's a bestselling author. I'm sure she had _something_ interesting to write!"

"Don't believe me? Read for yourself." She sat beside him on the bed, and he turned the screen toward her. The e-mail consisted of one word: "Polo."

Below that was a record of the preceding dozens of e-mails between Booth and Brennan. From the day they parted in May of 2010 to this April 2011 evening, the former partners had e-mailed any time they had computer access. Each e-mail consisted of a single word, with Booth sending "Marco," and Brennan replying, "Polo."

Booth clicked "Reply," typed, "Marco," then sent the new message.

"That's so sweet," Kate moaned. "I think I'm going to be ill." She wasn't being sarcastic: the simple correspondence was one of the sweetest things she'd ever seen, and her nausea wasn't from disgust. It was from fear, plain and simple.

"We agreed not to talk this year. It's the only way to move on. But we had to know each other was okay, so we agreed on this system her brother used to check on her when they were kids."

"So you haven't told her about me?"

"No. I want to, but I'm trying to figure out the best way. I don't want her to go into our meeting with false hope, but I don't want her to find out when she's all alone, either. She needs Angela."

"You say it like she's going to be heartbroken, but you said she wasn't interested. What, is she the possessive type? She doesn't want you, but she doesn't want anyone else to have you?"

"Okay, either you misunderstood what I said, or I explained it wrong."

"What do you mean? You said you asked her out, and she said, 'It's could never happen.'" Booth winced at the dismissive tone Kate used to imitate Bones. She sounded like a head cheerleader politely-but-firmly obliterating a nerd's hopes of taking her to prom. "So you realized your feelings were unrequited and decided to move on."

Booth sighed. "I explained it wrong. I'm an idiot. If I _wasn't _an idiot, I'd let you believe that's what happened. It would be a hell of a lot simpler."

"Deceiving me wouldn't make you smarter. It would make you a jerk. Besides, I'd find out the truth eventually."

"You always do," Booth said, giving Kate her favorite smile: the warm one that made her heart expand like a balloon until she was sure it would float her away.

"Wait, then what _was_ it like?"

"She was crying and_ I_ was crying, and she basically told me she didn't think she was capable of love."

"Dammit, Seeley!" Kate smacked him with a pillow.

"Oof! Don't call me Seeley!"

"You're making me feel sorry for her. I don't want to feel sorry for her!"

"Yeah, well, it's unanimous, because she hates pity, and you pitying Bones makes me really uncomfortable." W her laptop on a nearby table.

"I liked it better before, when I thought she was this awesome-yet-untouchable chick who just didn't feel the same spark you did. Now I'm stealing love from a woman emotionally scarred by her tragic past."

"What do _you_ know about her 'tragic past'?"

"Reporter, J. I researched you, remember? I read the press coverage and some of the transcripts from her dad's murder trial."

"See, this is why I never liked reporters. You're like stalkers."

"No," Kate replied haughtily, "_Stalkers_ don't get paid."

Booth laughed harder than he had in quite a while, but turned serious. "You're not stealing anything. You know that, right? We had six years to go for it, to make it right, but it never happened. Remember that shrink I told you about, Sweets? He said it was like we missed our moment, so we kept punishing each other for it. And Sweets was right. Only we were beating ourselves up, too. There's only so long you can bang your head against a brick wall, you know?"

"So I didn't _steal_ you, I snapped you up in a scratch-and-dent sail? 'Minor brain damage from repeated brick-wall collision, but still fully functional.'"

Booth smirked at Kate's salesman voice. "Exactly."

Kate suddenly asked, "What meeting?" She moved from sitting beside Booth to kneeling on the bed, facing him.

"What?" Booth replied, baffled. Kate's non-sequiturs often disoriented Booth as much as the worst squint-techno-babble ever had.

"Earlier, you said you didn't 'want her to go into our meeting with false hope.' What meeting?" Her eyes pinned Booth like he was a particularly cagey subject.

"You're like a tape recorder!" he exclaimed, then sighed. "When we get back to D.C., a year from the day she left, we're supposed to meet at the Reflecting Pool, by the coffee cart."

Kate's stern look melted, and her right hand involuntarily rose to her heart. "Like 'An Affair to Remember'? God, I love that movie."

"The one everybody kept talking about in 'Sleepless in Seattle'? That's…no, it's nothing like that. First of all, no tall building! Second of all? It's a completely different city. And no one is getting hit by a taxi cab." He crossed himself.

"I love it when you do that," Kate murmured without thinking, and Booth blushed. "Are you blushing?" Every time she thought she couldn't love him more, he proved her wrong.

"I know it's silly, but…"

"It's not silly! It's a gesture of your faith. I'm a Protestant, so I'm lighter on the religious rituals, but this is a tough world, and maintaining faith is hard work. Whatever helps you do it is worthwhile. It's worth _everything_."

"Thank you," he said, gently. He'd needed to hear someone say that to him. The saying goes, "There are no atheists in a foxhole," but Booth found warzones the hardest places to maintain his beliefs. He knew Kate sometimes felt the same way: baffled by how these atrocities could possibly be part of God's plan. But after one of Booth's nightmares, Kate had whispered a line from the Bible in the dark: "Fear not the terror by night, nor the arrow that flies by day." She couldn't remember the chapter or verse. The words had just come to her, and she had needed to say them. Calm had washed over Booth then, and that was the moment he first knew he loved Kate. He remembered that moment now, and took the hands of the young woman before him. "It's like I was meant to find you."

"I know," Kate said. "I feel the same way about you." _The question is, am I meant to__ keep you?_


	3. Chapter 3

**AN: Sorry about the huge delay. I currently work two jobs and have no internet.  
**

* * *

It's so quiet now without her in your bed. In the muffled night, you jerk awake at the snap of the whip, but when you open your eyes, you are alone. The scars on your back burn like new, but the wetness there is sweat, not blood.

You wonder how many times a man can lose his family (birth family, adoptive family, chosen family). You wonder how many times you can lose while maintaining faith that someday you'll have the love you need and get to keep it.

You turn on your laptop in the dark and open a file. It's the book you've written twice already. Each time, you came to understand your subjects better, and yourself. But you've decided this is your last chance to get it right. First you thought it was about Yin and Yang: the attraction of opposites. Then you thought it was about the force of denial. Now…now you think it's about the gamble. He said something to her that night. They walked out of your office into the DC night, and the next time you saw them, everything had changed. But you don't know what happened in between.

It was hard enough when they sat in your office, bantering and avoiding your questions. Now all you have is e-mail. E-mail, an empty apartment, and the fears that crack you awake.

* * *

Dear Dr. Sweets,

I don't understand why you are restarting your book instead of merely revising for accuracy. Your assertion that the Cleo Eller case was the first upon which Booth and I were partners was inaccurate, so of course revising the first chapter and any subsequent references to said case is essential.

However, I do not see how one factual inaccuracy invalidates your overall evaluation of our partnership. As your conclusion was based on psychology, and is thus subjective, how could your results be invalidated?

Perhaps this experience will help you seek the superior understanding provided by hard science. Neurochemistry, for example, would allow you to test Booth and I for the presence of the chemicals that accompany the state colloquially know as "love." You could examine the data to confirm or refute your hypothesis before drafting your text. Using measurable physical evidence would save you a lot of time and frustration.

That said, I agree to write letters regarding my partnership with Booth and my feelings in his absence. Dr. Wyatt once informed us that our team has formed a surrogate family unit. We meet the western anthropological markers for families, as well (shared meals and holidays, traditions, storytelling, etc.) It has recently occurred to me that leaving may have resulted in feelings of distress for you, and these letters may relieve that distress. Miss Wick (who I had to reprimand for reading over my shoulder) thinks that sounds like I'm using psychology, but I maintain that certain social rituals reinforce not only relationships on a personal level but our culture on a societal level.

Sincerely,

Dr. Temperance Brennan

* * *

Sweets,

Sure, but there's not much to say about our partnership right now since I'm here and she's in Mapupu. I can't really talk about what I'm doing over here. It's hot. It's sandy. I was supposed to be training soldiers far away from the front lines, but somehow I always end up there anyway. Locals want us to settle local disputes, solve crimes. They'll claim we killed a citizen, the local forces say it wasn't us, and I'll think, _If only Bones was here. She'd just look at these remains and know who's telling the truth._ That's all I'm going to say about the war.

Now, can you do me a favor? Check in on Cam and Parker. Cam's lost her whole team and she could use some support, both at work and with Michelle. And Parker…he said he wanted me to go, but I don't think he really knew what it would feel like. It would mean a lot to me, to know they're taken care of. Thanks, Sweets.

Booth

* * *

Dr. Wyatt had been right, years ago, when he pointed out that Booth and Brennan weren't opposites, Lance thought as he read their first e-mails to him. Though their writing styles were different, both partners expressed a willingness to help despite skepticism that their letters would be helpful, and both had attempted to maintain a personal connection with him.

Booth's subtle approach (essentially naming Sweets "man-of-the-house" in his absence) could have come off patronizing, but Lance took it as an honor—the spirit in which it was intended. Brennan's evaluation of him as part of her "surrogate family" was touching, and he was proud that the scientist had become emotionally aware enough to realize that those she left behind might miss her. True, she was projecting her feelings of abandonment onto him, but Sweets was far from offended.

As the year progressed, the letters shifted. Booth began to mention a reporter named Kate, and his tone regarding Kate was increasingly guilty. Sweets suspected they had formed a romantic relationship, and Booth was conflicted due to his feelings for Dr. Brennan.

Brennan tried to comply with Sweets' request by writing about her current work, comparing the remains she encountered to those she had found with Booth or comparing her interactions with her current coworkers to her interactions with Booth. For example: "It is refreshing that I can use the proper scientific terms for anatomy and injuries. However, I miss Agent Booth's ability to read and interpret an individual's minute physical signals (Booth refers to this as "following his gut"). Although this ability would not be helpful with identifying the cause of death for the remains we've uncovered, it would help to navigate the complex interpersonal relationships that have developed here and which take precious time and energy away from our work."

Drawing emotional reflection from Dr. Brennan was so difficult that he had even turned to Daisy.

* * *

Dear Lance,

I'm SO glad that you don't hold my leaving against me, although I still think you should either have come with me or agreed to wait for me. I mean, why break up with me? I'm awesome! And you're awesome, and we're awesome together! ;)

Anyway, I think Dr. Brennan is doing very well. She's already made several scientific breakthroughs, not only in what she has discovered about the remains we've found, but it in new techniques she's developed for studying the remains. Dr. Brennan is teaching us all new techniques. She's getting along pretty well with everyone, although no one else _gets_ Dr. Brennan the way I do. That makes sense, though, since she and I have such a special bond.

But to answer your more specific questions: No, I have not seen her express any romantic feelings toward anyone here. Perhaps more notably, I haven't even seen her express any sexual feelings. I mean, she told Dr. Johnson that he was pleasingly symmetrical and that he had an impressive shoulder-to-hip ratio, but that was five months ago, and she has failed to act on that observation. Have I noticed her using distancing techniques? Okay, kind of? That one's hard for me, though, because you say correcting is a way to create distance, but I do that, and it's not to keep people away. It's because they're wrong, and how are they supposed to learn the truth if you don't tell them? So I guess Dr. Brennan does that one, if it even counts, which I don't think it does. Some of the other ones you listed don't really count on the dig, either. Everyone here is extremely focused on their work "to the detriment of their social lives." Also, use of "scientific jargon" is ENCOURAGED here.

In fact, several of the activities you suggest would just get Dr. Brennan ostracized. Care for her appearance? I can tell you from experience that being too attractive can intimidate some scientists or lead others not to take you seriously. Talk about her personal life? She's a rich, bestselling author. Her father and brother have both been charged with felonies, and he's had run-ins with serial killers. She's also killed people. I find these aspects of Dr. Brennan's past only make her more impressive, but I suspect some of the other scientists would not feel the same way. They might find it scary or distracting. So as much as your advice helped me get back into the Jeffersonian after I was fired, I think it's best if Dr. Brennan is just herself here. Although I will say that she seems better at reading body language than she was when I first met her, which has probably helped her social interactions.

Love,

Daisy

* * *

Lance laughed. He could hear the perky woman's voice loud and clear in her e-mail. The letter was just like Daisy: energetic and scattered, but accurate, efficient and full of information. Should he have agreed to wait for Daisy? No. No, they both had to be open to whatever life brought them. Maybe after this was all over, they could get back together, but if that happened, it should be a choice, not just adherence to commitment.

He had fantasies sometimes about what things would be like in a year: Bones and Booth back, working together and dating (having come to terms with their feelings while apart); Hodgins and Angela would come back, too (perhaps with a baby to follow soon after); he would reunite with Daisy (who would be named Dr. Brennan's permanent intern); and they would all work together with Cam at the Jeffersonian.

Lance knew the elements of his daydream wouldn't all come true. Parts of it would, and parts wouldn't. Some would be worse, but some might even be better. That was Sweet's general outlook: optimism tempered by pragmatism.

According to many psychological studies, a person's basic outlook and personality is set by the time they're toddlers. Life events can temper it, but vast changes are rare. If he looked at himself objectively, like a patient, Lance had to admit that his optimism was remarkable in the face of the difficulties he'd faced. He could only imagine how optimistic he would have been if he'd never been abused, abandoned and orphaned.

So maybe the pain was worthwhile. It let him peek at the world as pessimists do, sure that happiness is rare, fleeting, and not for them. Yes, he had moments where he felt those same doubts, but he always emerged with the same certainty: that life is worthwhile. That love can save you. That you can save through love. This is his truth—a higher purpose, calling in the whip-crack night.


	4. Chapter 4

**AN: Sorry for the Uber-delay. I was really busy, and I didn't know how to reconcile what I'd written before the season began with what has happened since. I've decided to keep my OC's name and physical description, but since she's pretty close to the actual show's Hannah, I've merged them. Thanks for reading!**

Growing up, you were surrounded by too many faces: brothers and sisters (who found you weird, but loved you anyway), concerned parents, and classmates (who made fun of you for being younger and smaller, and complained that you blew the curve).

The best thing about this terrible place is the respite from so many faces with so many expressions demanding responses. You studied facial expressions and the corresponding emotions in an attempt to know the appropriate responses for each, but there are too many variables: body language, word choice, tone, locale, social standing. Perhaps that it why you love bones so much: no confusing flesh, no expressions. All too often, you get living people wrong.

In the army, you got it so wrong that they sent you home to the Jeffersonian— the one place where people understood you and vise-versa. Until, that is, you threw it all away.

You trusted reason, and the power of the mind..._your_ mind, but you accepted Gormogon's faulty logic: that all lives are equal, that the needs of the many outweigh the rights of a few, and that the ends justify the means. Hodgins thinks it's more important that you were trusting the words of a guy who eats people, which (A) is a social taboo and (B) you know from past cases can cause insanity.

Dr. Sweets is more concerned that you let people believe you're a murderer. Although the legal definition does not apply, the label _feels_ true. You'd _think _Sweets would take that as progress: you are trusting feeling over fact. He doesn't see it that way, though, which is unsurprising. You're rarely understood, and when you are, it takes people time to catch up. Time is something you now have in abundance.

At first, they all came to visit. Hodgins came most, and Angela. Cam came every other weekend, as did Dr. Sweets. Dr. Brennan came as often as her schedule permitted. Booth's visits were rarest, as most of his weekends were spent with Parker. Then, they'd all gone away. Booth, Brennan, Angela and Jack had each come in turn to explain their upcoming absence. Cam's disappearance had been more confusing until you saw some stories of her work problems in the news.

It's illogically upsetting that life at the Jeffersonian isn't as you left it, so you're relieved when Ms. Julian brings everyone home. They come in turn to say they're back and they missed you—even Booth—but it feels different and you don't know why. You wish, not for the first time, that people were as easy to understand as structural engineering or bones.

You miss the forensic platform, the feel of bones through latex gloves, or putting together a model airplane and watching it rise into the sky. They won't let you build things here—too many possibilities for weapons—but the therapists love it when you sing. They claim it's a good way to explore your feelings. They are wrong, but it makes other patients stop crying. It makes orderlies like you and give you more (supervised) computer time. You wish singing could make you feel better—sweep away your regret—but all you know are love songs.

There is no song for what you've done.

* * *

A few months after everyone came back to DC, the crew was gathering around a large table at The Founding Fathers for drinks after closing a tricky case. Booth looked at the sunglasses atop Kate's head.

"Are those Bones' sunglasses?"

"Yep. She gave them to me at the hospital. I told her gifts were customary."

Booth leaned right to whisper to his girlfriend, "Saving your life wasn't enough? That's kind of weird, Ace."

"It wasn't weird! We were bonding."

Booth's eyebrow was still raised when Dr. Temperance Brennan bustled in the door and sat at his left.

"Sorry I'm late, everyone. Zack says hello. He says the psychiatrists at the facility encourage him to sing to improve his mood. He finds it unhelpful, and I must agree. In fact, the idea of singing a solo makes me anxious." Dr. Brennan looked puzzled by that fact.

"Hello to you to, Dr. Brennan," Cam said with a laugh, used to the anthropologist's _non sequiturs_.

"Oh, yes. Hello, everyone," she replied with a little nod to her companions and she signaled a waiter for her usual.

"Lots of people are afraid to perform in public," Kate commiserated. "I hate to sing. I'm tone deaf—even worse than Seeley!"

"My voice is lovely," Bones said with such confidence that Kate laughed even as the others at the table nodded in agreement. "I never _used to_ mind singing," she mused, puzzled.

"Seriously?" Lance asked, half amused and half perplexed. "Dr. Brennan, you seriously can't think of a single reason why singing a solo makes you more anxious than it used to?"

"Are you suggesting my anxiety is due to 'Fat Pam'? That's highly illogical. Pam Nunan is dead, and as such could not interrupt another performance."

"Interrupt?" Angela asked in a soothing tone, placing a hand on her friend's forearm. "Sweetie, she shot Booth and you had to shoot her. That's due to cause some anxiety, however 'illogical.'"

Kate turned to Booth, scandalized. "You were shot while Temperance sang karaoke? Temperance had to kill someone? How have you never told me this story?"

"There's a lot of stories you haven't heard yet. And I don't really enjoy talking about killing people or the different times I got shot."

"Yes, well, my singing didn't cause Booth's injury and he didn't die—I just thought he did." Temperance paused and took a long sip of her beer before continuing, "Shooting Pam Nunan was unpleasant, but it should have no effect on my singing ability."

"You thought he was dead?" Kate's voice was gentler than Booth had ever heard it. "Wait, that was when the government faked your death?" Everyone's eyes turned to Kate in shock. "I did research on Booth when he was subject of my stories," she explained.

Brennan's eyes were even bigger and shinier than usual. Booth leaned in, trying to catch his partner's gaze. "They were supposed to tell you."

"I know," she replied, her voice tight. She couldn't look at him.

Booth sounded defensive to Kate, and Temperance was attempting to hide her pain. Dr. Sweets looked inexplicably pale. Kate smelled a story, but she forced herself to ignore it and turned her curiosity elsewhere. She turned to Jack Hodgins and Angela Montenegro. "Okay, I'm a sucker for how-they-met stories. How did you two get together?" In her peripheral vision, Kate saw Brennan and Booth's strained postures relax.

"We _met_ at the Jeffersonian during Booth and Dr. B's first case," Jack began, his arm around his wife's shoulders.

"But how we _got together_ is a longer story," Angela continued. She leaned against him, her long black waves briefly touching his short brown curls. Both beamed.

They told Kate about their years as coworkers, a date complete with a playground swing-set, Grayson Barasa ("a god among men," Cam interrupted enthusiastically, causing hearty laughs all around), Angela's father ("who shall remain nameless," the artist said, wary for the first time of Kate's press credentials), a tough breakup, and a bicep tattoo. They described their two weddings: the one they planned when they didn't get married and vice versa.

"When we broke up, I hated everyone," he said, gazing at Angela with his blue eyes shining.

"I find that hard to believe," Kate replied. Jack's smile was so big that she couldn't imagine him as miserable as he claimed, let alone hating the beautiful artist he so clearly adored.

"No, he did," Sweets said, and everyone laughed in agreement.

"He was quite unpleasant," Brennan said.

"But now I have everything: a great job, friends…"

"The Cantilever Group…" Booth added softly in Kate's ear. Only years of practice kept her jaw from dropping at the knowledge that the scientist across the table owned the third-largest privately-held corporation in the U.S.

"…my beautiful wife Angela, and the first of a million babies!"

Tears welled up in Angela's eyes, and she kissed Jack passionately. It was a beautiful story.

"So did either of you know you'd end up together, back when you met on that very first case?"

"No way," Angela said.

"I had a crush on her," Jack admitted. "I didn't think I stood a chance, but I hoped."

"What about you two? Did you know?" Kate asked, turning to Booth and Brennan.

Dr. Sweets nearly choked on his drink and sputtered into a napkin, stealing Kate's attention. Cam patted his back and took in the partners' stricken faces. She realized something she hadn't before: this thing between her ex and the beautiful anthropologist had apparently been there since day one, and the partners weren't as blind to it as others tended to assume. She quickly threw them a bone—no pun intended.

"Yes, Booth, Dr. Brennan, did you notice sparks between Angela and Hodgins during that first case?"

"Oh!" Brennan said, looking relieved. "No, I did not. I don't recall Angela expressing attraction toward Dr. Hodgins. She did mention finding Booth attractive, however."

"Bren!" Angela exclaimed.

"And I didn't notice anything, either," Booth quickly jumped in, "but I didn't interact with the other squints much on our first case. I was just trying to figure out how to work with Bones."

"And? Tell me more." Kate leaned forward in her seat, propping her elbow on the table, and her head upon her fist. Booth looked uncomfortable. Bones looked wary.

"Nobody wants to hear that story," Booth said.

"Sure I do!" Kate replied.

"Actually, I'd like to hear it, too," Angela admitted. Jack nodded.

Cam suspected Angela had an ulterior motive in backing Kate's request. Cam wanted to hear the story, too, but didn't want to make anyone feel awkward. Sweets' posture changed from friend mode to therapist mode. He looked both concerned about and fascinated by whatever was about to happen. The group's silence stretched as Booth and Brennan looked at each other, silently agreed, and launched into their story.


	5. Chapter 5

**I'm breaking from the usual format for this chapter: no second-person intro. Much of it rehashes the events of episode 5-16, but with important character reactions/interaction. Thanks for reading!**

* * *

'So Cam says, 'If she can solve a 4,000-year-old homicide, maybe she can help on Gemma Arrington. I could release the remains to her.' I tell her 'Forensics don't solve crimes, cops do,' And she gives me this know-it-all look that drove me nuts back when were dating." Everyone laughed, and Cam smirked. Booth pointed at her: "That's the one! And she says, 'Same activity, same results. Speaking of which, you look like you've been up all night.' I tell her I have it under control, I'm fine, and she says, 'Meaning you won?' The elevator doors are about to shut, and suddenly, I run back and hold them open."

Temperance broke in, "That's when _he _said, 'What's that scientist's name?' and _she_ answered, 'Temperance Brennan,'— which is me!" She smiled, then broke the rhythm of the story: "Booth, I never noticed the implications of that part before. Cam was implying that you had been up all night gambling successfully?"

"Yeah, Bones."

"You said you were at a Gamblers Anonymous meeting."

"I don't like telling people I was in a pool hall, okay?"

"But that night, when you told me you'd quit…"

"That was the truth."

"So, what, you quit sometime between the day we met and the day we solved the case?"

"Let it go, Bones." His voice was firm, their eyes locked.

At the look they shared, Kate could hardly breathe. In fact, everyone was uncharacteristically quiet. Of course she'd noticed the chemistry between Booth and Brennan before this, not to mention their nicknames and inside jokes. But this was the first time she'd felt the jolt between them.

They were having a silent conversation. Temperance's wrinkled brow said, _I'm confused. _Seeley's raised eyebrow, then slight nod to the others said, _No, you aren't, Bones. Don't make this awkward. _The anthropologist caught on and went back to the story.

"I was lecturing on de-fleshing techniques at American University."

The tension drained from Booth's face. "She was not what I was expecting."

"What were you expecting?" Angela asked.

"An old lady with orthopedic shoes and a bun." Everyone laughed again.

As they told the story of the Gemma Arrington case, it was like those clips in When Harry Met Sally of the old couples explaining how they fell in love—finishing each other's sentences with perfect timing honed over countless retellings. To Kate, it sounded like they'd told the story a thousand times, but from the looks on their friends' faces, only Sweets seemed to have heard it. The others had lived it, but they'd never heard the story from Booth and Brennan's point of view.

"So Caroline says, 'The beautiful scientist is fired! She just doesn't know it yet. That oversight is what _you_ must rectify. My advice? Get her drunk first.'"

"So he did!" Brennan said. "He got me very drunk on tequila, and he fired me. No one had _ever _fired me. No one has since!"

"I didn't want to!" He exclaimed. Telling the story was getting sticky. Sweets was on the edge of his seat, wondering whether they would disclose what came next or gloss over it. "But you assaulted a federal judge."

"You said it was hot."

"It was hot." They both laughed.

"I was upset at being fired, but then I realized…" she stopped talking and looked at Booth questioningly.

"Hell," Booth said, running a hand through his hair, "Just put it all out there, Bones."

"Okay," she said, "We realized if we didn't work together, we could have sex."

"WHAT?" Angela shrieked and everyone uttered sounds of shock. "Are you saying you two…have you been lying to me all these years?"

"No. We didn't have sex," Brennan replied. "We were going to. Booth called a cab and we stepped outside, and…" she stopped awkwardly.

"I told her I had quit gambling."

"I asked him, 'Why did you feel you had to tell me that?'"

"I told her…I told her I though this was going somewhere, and then…"

"We kissed."

"You kissed?" Angela squealed.

"That's what _I_ said!" Sweets exclaimed.

"Then what?" Angela asked.

The same question had been on the tip of Kate's tongue, but all story long, she'd stayed in the background. She knew they were editing the story because of her presence—that every awkward pause was because of her. But she knew that she was also the reason that the story was being told at all. Sitting around this table were their best friends, yet in eight years since Booth and Brennan met, only their therapist had heard the whole story.

Booth never could stand lying. He was the strong, silent type, and he didn't like burdening others with his problems. He was good with keeping confidential information secret. That said, he'd considered this untold story lying by omission. Kate could see some of its burden lifting from his shoulders.

"Booth turned all chivalrous, didn't he? Always the gentleman," Angela said.

"Actually, no. It was Bones. She said we shouldn't go home together because of the tequila."

"That doesn't sound like you," Angela murmured to her best friend.

Booth continued: "I said, 'So you're afraid that when I look at you in the morning I'll have regrets?' And she says…"

"That would never happen," Brennan finished. "I went home to bed."

"So did I."

Brennan explained how her team figured out how Judge Hastie killed Gemma Arrington, Zack delivered the evidence to Booth, and he and Cam delivered it to Ms. Julian.

"So Caroline says I can rehire Bones. I go over there all excited, but Bones says she's moved on. She's working on some weird skeleton…"

"_Ardipithecus ramidus kadabba!_"

"Right, and she's mad, but I can't figure out why. When she left in the cab the night before, she was smiling."

"Why _were_ you mad?" Sweets asked.

"I was working, and he was bossing me around. He said, 'Chop, chop!' _And_ he had gotten me drunk to fire me and have sex with me."

"_Y__ou_ brought sex up that night, not me. And when you changed your mind, I accepted it…"

"Graciously," they both concluded with a smile.

"The ride over is tense, but we finally get to the parking garage and we're looking at Judge Hasty's car. My people don't find anything, and Bones is saying we're morons."

"Booth got unreasonably offended by my assertion that scientists at the Jeffersonian are smarter than FBI technicians. He called me a cold fish!"

"And she called me brainless. So we're arguing and calling each other names when my people…"

"Following my direct instructions!" Temperance interrupted.

"…find this tiny ear bone in the trunk lock."

"A stapes."

"So I arrest Judge Hasty."

They told the rest of the story: the interrogation and how Bones discovered the motive, even the fight they had in front of Gemma's mother, and the bigger fight in the hall right after.

"You smacked Booth?" Angela asked, stunned.

"I did," she admitted, looking ashamed.

"I shouldn't have grabbed her," he quickly jumped in.

"I told him he was a bully, and I hated him," Temperance continued, "Then he said, 'What are you, ten years old? I'm not your dad.'" Her voice cracked a little.

"Woah," Sweets said. Brennan and Booth had summarized this part last time. Booth's statement about her father had unwittingly hit a nerve in Brennan all those years ago.

"I did? I'm sorry, Bones. I didn't know. I mean, you _know _I didn't know."

"Know what?" She seemed genuinely puzzled by both men's reaction. "I'm just repeating what was said. Then I said, 'I will never work with you again."

Booth picked up the thread of the story: "And I said, 'Who asked you?'"

"Eventually, _he_ did," she said with a smile. "Booth asked me to work with him again nearly a year later when he had me detained at the airport. But that's a different story."

The spell they'd held over the table for some time broke. Cam and Hodgins were eating and chatting. Sweets and Angela were each taking a bathroom break, and Brennan—tired of waiting for their waiter— was getting a fresh drink at the bar.

"Quite the story, J," Kate murmured.

"Yeah, well…" he shrugged. "Bones is good at telling stories. Best selling author, you know?"

"Mmm-hmm," Kate replied. "Listen, I gotta go. I have to run by the paper to pick up some credentials for an interview tomorrow. See you at home?"

He suspected that she really just wanted time to sort through what she'd heard. "Kate, all this happened before we met. Nothing has changed."

"You know better than that. We're investigators, J! We do it because we believe that the truth is important, and knowing the facts makes a difference. I know things now that I didn't before. That changes things. We just need to figure out _how_ it changes things."

She leaned forward to give him a light kiss, but he pulled her into a deeper one. It was a kiss meant to reassure her. Kate found herself trying to absorb and catalog every detail: the muscles of his forearm under her left hand, the stubble on his sharp jawline under her right, the feel of his lips, the taste of his mouth. _What if this is our last kiss? _she thought.

"I love you," he told her.

"I love you, too," she said, but she couldn't look at him or she would cry. She mustered a brave smile, called out a goodbye to all the squints, and slipped out the front door.

Sweets plunked into Kate's empty seat.

"Not now, Sweets, okay?" Booth ground out.

"I'm sorry, but you said some stuff tonight that you didn't tell me last time. Can you please just answer a question for me before I get another whole book wrong?"

"Fine. What is it?"

"What happened after you left my office that night when you two told me this story?"

Booth sighed and ruffled his own hair again. "I did what you said. I took a gamble."

"You did?" Sweets perked up in interest.

"Yeah. And I lost."

Sweets slumped. "I'm sorry, man."

"Don't be. It had to happen. You were right. We were stuck. We weren't together, but we couldn't be with anyone else. So I said we should go for it and I kissed her. She was scared. She said, 'You thought you were protecting me, but you're the one who needs protecting.'"

"From her?"

"Yeah. She said her heart wasn't open like mine and she couldn't change. I told her I knew she was _the one_, right from the beginning. But she started crying and told me she was a scientist and didn't know how to change."

Sweets shook his head with a bitter laugh. "Booth, science is all about change. Remember when Dr. Brennan decided to forgive her father? She said it was because, as an anthropologist, she knew change was inevitable. And that's what all scientific experiments are: you change one variable and observe the outcome."

"Yeah, well, I'm not a scientist. I don't know how to use science to talk someone into loving me. And that's not the point, anyway. She was telling me she wasn't ready to jump, and she might never be. I had my answer. I had to move on."

"So you went to war and she went to the Maluku Islands?"

"That wasn't the only reason. If it wasn't for Bones…"

"You'd have gone back a long time ago."

Booth shrugged.

"Is everything okay with Kate?"

"I don't know. Look, before you finish rewriting your book, you need to ask Bones about a talk we had in my car."

"Can't you just…" Sweets began, but the steely look on Booth's face stopped him. "Okay, I guess I'll ask _her_, then. I'm sorry that my advice didn't work. I really thought you two would work out."

"Yeah, well, I always thought so, too. I thought I'd spend the rest of my life loving her." Booth got up and walked to the bar for a drink of his own. The bar was crowded and Brennan had just gotten her drink. Sweets watched them stand sheepishly for a second, then laugh about some comment Booth made and fall into their normal stances.

"I think you will," Sweets said, but no one heard him through the crowd.


	6. Chapter 6

**AN- This begins with a brief recap of 6-9. Thanks for reading and for commenting. It means a lot to me!**

You see your ring on another woman's hand and your face in another woman's picture. You hear your voice in place of hers. It all leads to a back street in the dark, rainy night. You bend to touch the cracked reflector, and the headlights are speeding toward you. At the last second, he's there, pushing you out of the way.

A tiny, dark part of you wishes he hadn't. He keeps saving your life. He keeps pushing you to live, in ways that make you feel scared and broken. You were lonely sometimes before you met him, but you never felt broken.

And now you're following instincts instead of facts—staticky messages from the universe. For three days, your world has been upside-down.

"I made a mistake," you admit. You tell him about the other woman, the one who died with regrets: "She never gave him a chance. I got the signal, Booth. I don't want to have any regrets."

His lips tighten: "You know, I'm with someone, Bones, and Kate? She's not a consolation prize. I love her."

You weep. Part of you had hoped she was like all the others who had come and gone from your life and his—loved, but not like this thing you feel for each other._ He loves her, but like this? As deep and hard as this?_ You've never been in love before. You don't know whether what you feel for him is average. You suspect it is not.

"The last think I want to do is hurt you, but those are the facts," he says.

You want to laugh, because for once in a discussion of your relationship, you're talking about emotions and he's touting facts.

"I understand. I missed my chance. My whole world turned upside down. I can adjust."

"I did."

"Yes, you did."

The thing is, loving him isn't new. It's only new that you can admit it to yourself and to him. You've probably loved him for years—maybe from the start. Why else didn't you go home with him that first night? With anyone else that attractive, you would have, tequila or no. None of this makes sense. Why would loving him lead you _not_ to sleep with him? _Because I wanted it to start the right way. _So it had never started at all.

Until you met him, you'd been alone your whole life. When you tell him you're fine alone, you mean it.

* * *

"Wow. Dr. Brennan, that you initiated that conversation shows remarkable emotional growth on your part." They were the last two at the table. All their friends had already gone home. The Founding Fathers was gradually emptying of customers.

"I don't know what that means. There's no way to objectively quantify emotional capacity, so there's no way to measure emotional growth."

"Okay, two steps forward, one step back, I guess. What I'm saying is, you trusted instincts and emotion over fact. When you identified so closely with the victim, you explored that experience. A few years ago, you would have had your blood tested for hallucinogens or gotten a CAT scan."

"I did get a CAT scan the next week, just in case."

Sweets couldn't help but smile at that. "Nonetheless, you came to the difficult emotional realization that you love Booth, and you told him."

"I didn't actually say it in those words," she admitted.

"Baby steps," Sweets countered.

"And he looked unhappy—almost angry. He lips got tight and he clenched his jaw." She imitated it for him, the best she could.

"That could be a few things. Maybe he was upset by your timing. He loved you for seven years, and you didn't reciprocate until he was no longer available. He could also have been trying to control his own conflicting emotions. What do you think?"

"He says he loves her, and I believe him, but…"

"But what?"

"Are there different levels of love? I know there are different _kinds—_friendly, familial, romantic. But are there different…I mean, I feel like the word 'love' could apply to how I felt for Sully. It's not as intense as what I feel for Booth, but I could have gone with him, and maybe been happy for the rest of my life. It's just that my feelings for Booth always would have been there, in the background."

"Every love is different. For example, my love for my adoptive parents didn't undo how I felt for my birth parents. It didn't replace it. I felt both. But with my birth parents, when they died, they couldn't give me love anymore. You can't build a healthy, happy life on one-sided love. My adoptive parents—their love rebuilt me. It gave me the strength to move forward."

"And now that they're gone?"

"Now..." He took a deep breath and decided to be as brave and Brennan had been. "Now I have you guys."

"Baby duck," she murmured.

"What? Please tell me you don't call me that behind my back."

"No, it's just based on something Dr. Wyatt said about us being a family." She put her hand on his shoulder for a moment in the manner that expresses approval. "So Booth might love us both, but hers is the kind of love he can build on."

"What do _you_ think?"

"I still hate psychology. You refuse to give answers."

"Oh, please. I've broken so many rules with you two. In therapy, you're supposed to guide the patients to figure answers out on their own, but you guys? God, you're wicked stubborn! I had to tell you that you were in love and you should do something about it."

"And now here we are…"

"Yeah, it's a good reminder of why therapists shouldn't break those rules."

Brennan laughed, then sobered. "I'm not sorry, Sweets. Well, I'm sorry that I missed my chance, but not that Booth told me he wanted to be with me."

"I'm glad," Sweets replied. "So what do you do now? What do you want from life?"

"If I can't be with Booth? I don't know. I would like to continue working with him, making anthropological breakthroughs and writing. Before Booth's coma, I was going to have a baby. I still want a child, but I think using his sperm would be awkward at this point."

"Another good instinct! But just so you know: having Booth's baby via artificial insemination would have been awkward at any point."


	7. Chapter 7

**AN: Thanks to everyone who read, added alerts or made this story a favorite! A special thanks to _justcrazy, JesseniaRose _for your recent reviews. _EmeraldSoleil,_ thanks for refreshing my memory on the fate of Pam so I could fix chapter 4. Y'all are the greatest!  
**

The worst part of being an artist is when the picture on the canvass doesn't live up to the picture in your head. That's how it was with Brennan and Booth. Early on, you could see their happy ending more clearly than your own. His lion heart was warm enough to melt through her icy exterior and strong enough to support her. For years you gave them nudges and hints only to learn that they _knew_, knew all along, and had spent eight stupid years hiding it—running from it.

It was a like a palimpsest: velum scraped clean and reused in the days when writing materials were scarce. One story scraped away and written over. No, it was more like one of those paintings with another painting underneath. With x-radiographs and infrared studies, you could see the hidden layers. Some were better than the surface paintings.

You had seen their future when you looked at them: a happy family—and not just your wonderful, crazy work family—a husband and wife with beautiful kids. (God, would their kids be beautiful!) But now there was a layer painted right over that picture—a layer of time, distance, and denial (not to mention a vivacious reporter).

Avalon had read the original masterpiece in the cards, Brennan had written it on the page, and Booth had lived it in his dreams. But somehow everything had gone wrong. You wonder, as you've always wondered, how anyone could paint over something so beautiful.

You should be happy, snuggled in bed with your dreamy husband, the child you always wanted growing in your belly. Instead you're awake, staring at the ceiling. The word "restoration" echoes in your head.

* * *

Brennan had just dozed off when the buzzing began at her door. She tried to ignore it, but then her cell phone began blaring, as well. She squinted at the caller ID.

"Angela? Is everything okay? Is it the baby?"

"Just answer the door, Brennan."

She stumbled out of bed and buzzed her best friend into the building. Then she threw a robe on over her nightgown and put the kettle on for some tea. She'd prefer coffee, but Angela couldn't have caffeine, and Brennan didn't want to rub it in.

Angela pounded at the door, and Brennan opened it quickly. "Angela, you'll wake my neighbors."

"Good," the beautiful-but-rumpled artist replied, uncharacteristically cranky. "If we're awake, they can be awake." Angela paced Brennan's living room in burgundy satin pajamas with a long, belted gray cardigan and Ugg boots.

"Angela, please sit down. You're very agitated, and this stress is not good for the baby."

"I know," she grumbled, flopping down on the couch. "That's why I'm here. I was tossing and turning. This thing with you and Booth is driving me nuts! So I decided to come talk to you and get it out of my system."

"Get what out of your system?"

"That story you told tonight? Why have I never heard it?"

"What? Well, you were there for our first case. I didn't realize you needed to hear about it," she said, sitting beside her best friend.

"Not the case, Bren! The thing with you and Booth."

"Oh. Well you and I hadn't know each other long, and nothing happened in the end."

"Oh, please! You've told me about every relationship, flirtation and one-night-stand since we met. But despite all the times I suggested you get with Booth, you never told me that you almost did?

Brennan studied Angela's face carefully and sorted through all the things she'd learned from Booth, Sweets and years of observing her friend.

"I'm sorry I hurt your feelings. I didn't mean to."

Angela sighed, some of her annoyance fading. "I know that, sweetie. But why…"

"I didn't understand what happened. I didn't know what it meant. I only knew that when I met Booth I reacted illogically. Whenever I thought about that first case, I felt panic. So I tried never to _think_ about it…"

"…let alone talk about it." Angela sighed again. "I get it. But now you're obviously thinking about it. Something's changed, so spill!"

Brennan told her best friend about Sweets' book and the visit to tell him the truth. She explained what happened after she and Booth left Sweets' office: the plea, the kiss and the tears. She paused when the kettle shrieked and poured them each a cup of chamomile tea.

"So?" Angela asked, nearly vibrating with excitement, "What happened next?"

"He told me he needed to find someone who could love him for fifty years."

"And then you both took off for a year…"

"And he found Kate, yes."

"Wow, sweetie, that sucks."

"I want him to be happy, Ang."

"Yeah, well you're making a pretty big assumption, there, Bren: that he's happier with her then he would be with you. You think you're no good at love, but you are! You're the best friend I've ever had."

"It's not the same thing."

"You think that, but not counting my family, you're the longest relationship I've ever had! I bailed on every friend and lover. I started my life over and over. Then I met you and you gave me a home and a family." Angela sniffled and continued: "You know why I used to want 'a million babies'?" I love kids, but it's more than that. It's because that was the only kind of love I really trusted. Couples break up, friends grow apart, but parent and child? That's forever."

Angela noticed her friend's skeptical look. "I know that's different from what you grew up believing, Bren, but now you know I'm right. Your parents left to save you. Anyway, I used to think I was too flighty for anything long-term. That's why I couldn't marry Hodgins the first time. Then, one day, I realized how long you and I had been friends, and that we always would be—which made me realize if I can love one friend forever, I can be _in love_ with one person forever. And you can, too."

"At Christmas, I told Booth I made a mistake, but it was too late. He loves her, Ang."

"Oh, sweetie," Angela crooned, setting down her teacup and pulling her best friend into a hug. "He's a loyal guy, too. Not the type to just cast off one woman for another. I mean, look how long it took him to get over you."

"He'd only been gone a few months!" Brennan exclaimed, her eyes shining with unshed tears.

"Sweetie, he held on to hope for six years after you rejected him the first time. That night outside Sweets' office, he finally let it go. It didn't take him months. It took him almost seven years to move on."

"I know." Brennan pulled away and attempted to rebuild her usual composed appearance. "Now I just have to move on, too."

"Or you could fight for him!"

"What? Ang, he loves Kate, and she's a good person."

"A good person with _your_ Booth! _And_ your sunglasses. What is with that, anyway?"

"I forgot to bring her a gift at the hospital. I thought it was a female bonding ritual."

"Bren, have I ever forced you to give me an article of your clothing?"

"No, but you sometimes take food from my plate. I thought it was equivalent. Angela, I told him how I felt and he turned me down. Now I must move forward. I'm thinking about having a baby. That was the plan before Booth's coma. I need to find new sperm, though. I think—and Sweets concurs—that using Booth's would be inappropriate given the circumstances. It's a shame, really. The sample is still frozen, and should be good for another nine years or so."

Angela's face broke into a wicked grin. "That is a great idea, Bren! And you should definitely tell Booth!"

"I planned to, as it's likely to affect our work," Brennan replied. "I should act quickly, as fertility declines in a woman's late 30s. Also, with my child and yours just a year or so apart in age, they would likely play together well, especially once they both gain the ability to walk and talk."

"Aw! Now I feel bad."

"Why?"

"Okay, to be honest, Bren, I was partly just encouraging this plan because it's going to drive Booth nuts."

"What? 'Nuts' is slang for making someone insane. Why would my choice to procreate make Booth insane? I don't want to make Booth insane!"

"It drove him nuts last time!"

"Last time, Booth had a brain tumor."

"It was more than the tumor. He couldn't stand the thought of you having anyone else's baby. And I'd wager—Kate or no Kate—that he still won't be able to stand it. Look, Kate's nice, smart, blah, blah, blah. It sucks that someone has to get hurt in this situation, but better her than you."

"Why? Why better her than me?"

"Because she's not 'the one' for Booth! Honestly, we're doing her a favor in the long run."

"We're not doing anything to Kate! I'm just trying to adjust and move on!"

"That's even better, because if you were a home-wrecker, Booth wouldn't see you the same way—you wouldn't be _his Bones_. Look, you two are meant to be together. What did Avalon say? It all works out. So forget what I said about Kate. Just focus on what you need to do to move on. Tomorrow we start checking sperm donor registries, and Monday, you tell Booth. The rest will sort itself out."


	8. Chapter 8

**Thanks to Tartantrace, KlingonGal8489, Cremant and SouthunLady for the new reviews! Okay, I feel like I remember Cam saying she had an abortion in college, but I can't find the episode. Did I merely dream it or read it in a fanfic? Hmm… Sorry if the topic's a sore subject, but it's mentioned briefly, and the section after the intro continues Temperance's sperm search, so bear with me.**

* * *

You never thought about whether you'd be a mother. Then, you were pregnant too young—single and still in school. Your father never would have understood, and you wanted more from your life than to be like those girls in your neighborhood scrounging to get by and support their babies. You had an abortion and made it through college and med school to become a renowned coroner.

Then you fell in love with a man who had a daughter, a beautiful daughter who became yours. You raised her for years until Andrew strayed again and again. He didn't really love you. You would never be anything but second-best with him. You left them both, hoping that someday he would let someone in for real as his partner and Michelle's mother.

Since then, you'd given up on motherhood. When Angela asked you whether you wanted to have a baby, you answered honestly: "Screaming, crying, vomit, other bodily fluids; it's just like a day around here. Not worth giving up this body for _that."_

But you got Michelle back through a terrible miracle. You wouldn't have wished Andrew's fate on anyone, but it returned your daughter to you. You were a mom again. There was screaming and tears, but no vomit, and you got to keep your figure. There has been anxiety and sleepless nights, and a lot fewer hookups with god-like hotties like Grayson, but it's good to come home to the beautiful girl—to give her love and be loved in return.

When Dr. Brennan first told you she wanted a baby, you were shocked. That she planned to use Booth's sperm was less surprising. "I know I've had no interest in the past," she'd said, "But neither did you and you seem to find parenthood very fulfilling."

That's the perfect word: fulfilling. But motherhood wasn't all the anthropologist had wanted. She'd wanted to make a child with Booth, in more ways than one. Brennan had wanted a part of Booth to be hers forever, not trusting love alone to make him hers. That's why she hadn't gone through with using Booth's sperm. The story she wrote—Booth's dream—showed them something more: a life in which they were truly together. Everything else seemed hollow after that.

When Booth told you he loved Dr. Brennan, you warned him not to tell her unless he was sure: "Because if you crack that shell, and you change your mind, she'll die of loneliness before she'll ever trust anyone again."

You don't know what happened—not the details—but you've seen the crack in Dr. Brennan's shell. You may have underestimated her, though. Instead of retreating, empty, she's moved forward, search for a way to be whole.

* * *

"Do I want it _back?_ No, I don't want it back? What would I do with it? I have access to all of _it _that I need!" Booth exclaimed with an involuntary glance down.

"Fine. I'm sorry that I've made you uncomfortable. I just realized that since it would be inappropriate for me to use your sperm, I should offer to return it."

"Where is this even _coming from_, Bones?" They were walking from the crime scene back to his SUV. Bones was wearing coveralls and gum boots. Booth was wearing his usual suit. Each carried a disposable coffee cup. Booth's agitated gestures while he spoke threatened to slosh hot coffee on his right hand.

"I had intended to have a baby. Your tumor and subsequent coma distracted me from that goal. Now I would like to return to it. However, I've come to realize that your relationship with Kate would make using your sperm awkward. Sweets says it would have been awkward anyway. He dedicated a chapter to it in the new draft of his book, but his evidence is anecdotal at best. He claims we were trying to forge a link that we couldn't otherwise, and a baby would give us a way to sublimate feelings which had become too intense to be channeled into work alone."

"Wow, that's…that's a lot of information coming at me all at once."

"Yes, well, it's just psychological interpretation. Nonetheless, from an anthropological standpoint, when a male fathers a child with one woman but is paired with another, hierarchical conflicts often ensue, so I'm investigating other sources of sperm."

Booth nearly spit out his coffee. "Look, we're not there yet, okay? We are not at the point where I can listen to you talk about searching for sperm. Couldn't you just adopt?"

"I'd like to, someday. My lawyer says my dangerous lifestyle, long workdays and felony weapons charge make adoption 'challenging, but not impossible.' However, I also want to experience childbirth and impart a child with my DNA."

Booth growled, but didn't speak.

"This isn't driving you nuts is it?" Booth raised his eyebrows at her. "Angela said it would drive you nuts, but I'm not trying to. I'm just…adjusting, like we discussed."

"Look, Bones, I'm being irrational. If you want to have a kid, have a kid. It's none of my business, it's just…don't pick any loser's stuff! Don't you know any nice guys who would help you out? Not Fischer!"

"Well, we've established that I can't use the sperm of any friends with significant others, as it would likely cause discomfort. That eliminates you, Hodgins and Sweets. I suppose I could ask a former boyfriend or lover. Maybe Andrew? Or better yet, Sully is intelligent and has nice bone structure."

"Hacker or SULLY? You're going to call up Sully and ask for his sperm? Hell, why not the deep sea welder?"

"I was planning to go to a sperm bank. You're the one who suggested obtaining a donation from someone I know!"

"You know what? Angela was right. This conversation is making me nuts. Look, forget I said anything. Pick one out of the catalog, and good luck!"

"Thank you, Booth!" she exclaimed, beaming.

He sighed. Bones was getting better at reading nonverbal clues, but she still missed a lot. He was glad that she had mistaken his sarcasm for a blessing. He had no right to be territorial over her womb or her hypothetical baby. Intellectually, he knew that, but part of him couldn't accept it.


	9. Chapter 9

**AN- People, the site's Story Traffic page and the Story Statistics hit counter aren't working for me. I have no idea how many of you are reading this, which is making me nuts. I'm comforting myself with the fact that 57 of you have signed up for alerts, and 8 of you have named this story one of your favorites. Thank you so much! **

**A special shout out to SouthunLady, justcrazy, KlingonGal8489, Tartantrace and Thump for reviewing chapter 8. Reviewing multiple chapters? Y'all rock! **

* * *

You dream you are back in Afghanistan: noises, dusty streets and danger. In this dream, you don't conduct interviews or parole with troops. Instead, you lie on a solitary bunk, crying. _I always knew…_ you think.

_Snap out of it,_ you tell yourself._ Go out and find a story. Hell, go out and get a life!_

But you can't—not this second. All you can do for now is sob over what you've lost. In a moment you'll be your strong, kick-ass self. You'll dry your eyes. If anyone asks about their redness, you'll blame the sand.

You will start over, the way you have every time before. This time, it will be your story. You won't be a second choice.

* * *

"So I was at your crime scene today," Kate said as she and Booth cleared away their supper dishes.

"You were?"

"Yeah. My editor said he could tell I was getting wanderlust, so he wanted to throw me a juicy story. But then I saw you on the scene, so I had to turn my notes over to Feldman. Conflict of interest."

"Oh. Sorry you had to give up the story."

"There'll be another. Speaking of which, what were you and Temperance fighting about?" Kate tried to be cool about it, but their discussion had looked rather passionate for an exchange between coworkers or friends.

"You heard that?" Booth replied, looking guilty. 

"No, I saw it. You looked like you were practicing semaphore," she teased, expecting a laugh from him. She didn't get one.

"Oh, well…it's complicated." Seeley saw the mixture of hurt and anger on Kate's face as she tucked strands of red hair behind her ear. "Okay, okay. This is embarrassing, but…she wanted to know if I wanted my sperm back."

"What?"

"Yeah, I probably should have built up to that one. See, a few years ago, Bones decided to have a baby. She asked if I would donate the sperm, so I did."

"You did?" Kate wanted to ask him why, but she knew already. "She never used it?"

"No. That's when I got that brain tumor I told you about."

"What does your tumor have to do with Temperance deciding not to use your sperm? Did she decide it was defective?" 

"No! At lease, I don't _think_ so. I told her if she had the kid, I'd want to actually be its father, but then I had to get surgery and went into a coma. When I woke up, it took me a while to get back to my old self. By then, everything was different."

"So why is she returning the sperm now?" Booth winced when she said "sperm," which made Kate want to laugh, despite the sinking feeling in her stomach.

"Oh, well, she's decided she still wants a kid."

"But not your kid?"

"She and Sweets decided it would be inappropriate and awkward."

"What do you think?"

"What? I agree with them, of course!" he snapped.

Kate raised an eyebrow. "What will Brennan do instead?"

"Use a sperm bank, I guess."

"Your jaw is twitching."

"It is?"

"Seeley…"

"Don't call me Seeley, Ace."

"Seeley," she said, dead serious, taking his face in her hands, "you wanted her to pick you, didn't you? You hate the idea of Temperance having someone else's baby." Kate released his face, and Booth took her hands in his.

"Yeah, but not like you think, okay? When I was in that coma, I dreamt this whole world where Bren and I were together. We were married, and she was having my baby. So watching her have someone else's baby would just be weird."

Kate pulled away and began to pace. "Don't you think it's weird for her to see us together?"

"I know," he replied. "That's my point. Things are different from how we used to think they'd be. It's an adjustment…for all of us."

"I'm not sure I want to _be _an adjustment."

"That's not what I meant. You're amazing, Kate."

"And maybe if you'd met me first…" She stood, walked to their bedroom and grabbed her duffle bag.

"No. Kate, I love you. I want to be with _you_. What are you doing?"

Kate began to pack, throwing her things into the bag. For once she was glad to have so few belongings.

"Look, I gave up a lot to be here with you. And I know you're trying to give her up for me, but I'm not sure you can. Sure, you can vow never to touch her and keep that promise—I see it sometimes: your hand is about to rest on the small of her back, but at the last second you pull it away. You probably don't even realize." He didn't. "But you still scream for her in your sleep. I try to calm you down: 'It's okay, J,' or 'She's safe, Seeley.' You know the only thing that works? When I pretend to be her: 'I'm here, Booth. I'm okay. We're safe now, Booth.'"

He winced. "You don't have to do that. I never wanted you to be her."

"But you do: that's the point. When you're awake, you pick me, but subconsciously she's all you want. I know love isn't supposed to be selfish or jealous, but that's how I'm starting to feel."

"Kate…"

"I'm sorry, Booth, but you know I can't stay." He followed her to the bathroom where she began to pick her toiletries out of the medicine cabinet.

"You can," he replied, eyes glistening. "Look, Bones and I, we aren't…"

"Stop! Just stop, okay! Be a detective for a minute," she proclaimed, stalking back into the living room. She touched the Bakelite phone—a perfect gift for Seeley, selected by Dr. Temperance Brennan. "Look at the evidence. Who do you really need to be with? On the surface, we're a good match: smart, sexy investigators. But there's always more to the story than what's on the surface."

"Kate, I love you!"

"I know, J. I love you, too. But that's why I have to go. You can't give me what I need, and I can't be what you need. Eventually it would mess us up." She knew it with the gut certainty that had steered her away from doomed markets and rigged streets. She forcefully zipped shut the full bag. "Getting over you is going to suck, Seeley Joseph Booth."

"Same to you, Kate. Seriously, what am I supposed to do without you?" He looked lost, and for a moment Kate doubted herself. She wanted so badly to throw down her bag and promise never to leave him. She shook off the impulse.

"Suffer," she joked, but her voice broke and she started to cry. "Damn it, J, you ruined my exit. Don't you know not to make a redhead cry? I was supposed to leave looking strong and hot. Now I'll leave looking like Rudolph."

He chuckled dryly and wiped away her tears with his thumbs. Then they kissed, and again Kate recorded every aspect of it in her mind, knowing this really would be the last time. 


	10. Chapter 10

**AN: Sorry about the delay! I can't believe I started this story over the summer and it's still not done. This season's plots just threw me for a loop! Back on track now, though. **

* * *

You stand against the railing looking out at the water. In your pocket is a ring. If you were honest with yourself you would have to admit that you bought it for all the wrong reasons. You bought it because Sweets—the frickin' baby duck—was ready to marry Daisy. Because a kid who'd always looked up to you suddenly had this disdain for your life. He saw you as an old man who'd never been married, and in that moment you'd felt old. Sometimes, Sweets would look at you with pity, like you were making a mistake. And Bones would look at you like…whatever. You didn't want to think about it, so you bought a ring: huge, sparkling, savings-emptying.

But Kate had left, and now all you have is an empty apartment, a Bakelite phone and a diamond in your pocket. You grab it, look at it one last time and cast it into the Potomac. You do not take aim.

* * *

Alone at the table, Booth looked through the window and saw Bones standing alone in the street. For once, he let himself watch her without worrying about what it meant or what others would think. She had just accepted a shell from her father and embraced him. After Max departed, she lifted the shell to her ear, listening to the rushing of a false ocean.

It was a stack of improbable things occurring all at once: Dr. Temperance Brennan hadtrusted her father, shown him affection, and indulged in a misperception.

Booth didn't know the science behind hearing the ocean in a shell, but if he still placed bets, he'd have wagered big that Bones would lecture her father about it when he handed her the gift. Instead, after he was gone, she held the shell to her ear and smiled.

She'd been changing slowly since the day they met, and faster while they were apart.

A year ago, Booth gave up on a future with Temperance and started building a new life with Kate. Now he didn't have any of it. Kate was gone. The dreamlife with Brennan had faded. His old ease with Bones is gone. And now she loved him. _Now_.

Part of him wanted to run out that door, kiss her, jump into the cab they should have caught all those years ago. Another part of him was angry. For so many years Booth protected her feelings and worked damn hard getting her to trust him, trust herself, trust love.

Back then, Booth trusted love completely. He'd been sure that she was his future. Cam warned him once not to break Brennan's heart or she would never let anyone in again.

No one had been worried about his heart.

It was something he and Bones had in common, actually: they both hated change. Giving up on Bones had meant changing the way he saw himself and the world. "I'm _that guy_," he'd told her. "I _know._" Moving on meant rejecting the part of him that felt so sure.

When he met Kate, the thought, _Maybe all those people are right: there's no such thing as soul mates or destiny. There's just the things you choose and the things you don't. _Now Temperance was expecting him to go back, somehow. In the car that night, her eyes had begged him: _Believe in us. Love me. You're the one who was supposed to love me no matter what. You're the one who was never going to leave. And now you're within reach, but you're so far away._

Bones had broken his heart. Kate had broken his heart. It was time to begin again, but Booth didn't know how. Last time he left, but he couldn't do that again. Booth had accepted a call to duty that he would have accepted if Bones had never been in the picture. Achieving the distance necessary to heal had been a bonus. But he'd been fooling himself: Parker had missed Booth more than they anticipated, and Booth had new deaths to atone for. If he went back feeling this way about serving, it wouldn't be honorable. It would be running. Whoever Booth now was, he wasn't a coward.

He threw down money on the table and walked out to talk to her, but he was too slow. Her cab was pulling away. He shook his head at the taillights and the latest event in almost a decade of bad timing.


	11. Chapter 11

**AN- Some of this dialogue is taken directly from the awesome writing in episodes 13 and 15 of season 6. Hooray for the actual writers!**

You had once explained to Booth that a heart could not be broken, only crushed. When Kate's phone call comes, that's how you feel. The news that she has left Booth fills you with a combination of hope and dread that clamps around your heart like a fist. It makes your chest literally ache, and for the first time you understand why societies have made the heart the metaphorical center of love. You feel broken.

"Check on him, okay?" she says.

You agree, but reluctantly. You feel guilty, which is illogical. When he had returned from the war with Kate, you'd supported him. When your feelings overwhelmed you, you told Booth the truth. When he told you Kate was not a consolation prize, you accepted his decision and tried to move on. Still, you know when you walk into the Founding Fathers, he will be hurting, and when Booth hurts, you hurt. You also know that he might be mad, like that cold, wet night in his car.

At the bar, the situation is as bad as you'd feared.

"You know what? Drink. Drink! I'm just really," he throws back a shot, "just mad. I'm just really mad at all of you. Alright? I'm just mad, okay? So you know how this is gonna work? This is how this is gonna work: Me and you are partners." He sniffles and you want to touch him, but you do not. "That's what we do. We're partners. Alright? And I love that, I think that's great." His tone does not match his words. It doesn't sound like sarcasm. It sounds like when a witness lies, but seems as desperate to convince himself as you or Booth. "We're good people who catch bad people, right? And…and we argue back and forth. We're partners and sometimes after we solve a case, we come here and we celebrate. That's what we do. We celebrate. So, as far as I can see, that is what happens next." His voice nearly broke. "Are you okay with that? Great, because if you are, you stay here and have a drink with me, alright? Maybe we have a little small talk. Chit-chat. And if you're not, well, you can leave. There's the door and tomorrow I'll find you a new FBI guy."

He wants to go back to how things used to be. The metaphorical fist tightens around your heart. You fight back your urge to cry. "Those are my only choices?" you ask.

"Yeah, those are your only choices."

"Then I'll have a drink," you say and throw back the whiskey. It warms your throat, and the symbolic phalanges gripping your heart loosen their grip by and infinitesimal margin. In unison, you and your partner gesture to the bartender for another shot. Somehow you find hope in the synchronicity, and the pain in your chest eases a tiny bit more.

* * *

Temperance Brennan had always been into physical fitness, but in the past it was for the maintenance of her body. Since working with Booth, being in shape had a greater purpose. Speed was sometimes the difference between catching a killer or losing one, between escaping from a bad guy or not. Also, exercise releases endorphins, and she could use the help. She had never been so uncertain about where her life was going. She returned to DC and to Booth, but Kate had been between them.

When Kate left, instead of returning to Brennan, Booth had pushed her farther away. But on Valentines Day, with the Tommy Guns, it had been like old times—gunfire and laughter. Only later did she realize that he'd been using another voice. Had he merely been a character? Had they really been Booth and Bones, or had they been Tony and Roxie? Or maybe he was Booth, but he was pretending not to be angry anymore. The uncertainty made her feel sad and scared. She wasn't as impervious as she used to be, and at any moment Booth could become the angry man from the car, the angry man from the bar. The man who had told her more than once that they were never going to be more than partners.

If there was one thing Brennan had learned after her many years knowing Booth (One case, a year apart, five years as partners, another year apart, and the current year brought the total to eight years—with six years of close interaction) it was to believe what he had to say about matters of the metaphorical heart. On the other hand, the only times Booth had been wrong about love was when he tried to erect boundaries—lines that were not to be crossed. She had learned that no one— not Jarrod, not Booth, not even she— could keep a "heart" from feeling what it wanted to feel.

She was running at a pretty quick pace when Booth spotted her. He put on a burst of speed to catch up, darting behind her back and making her giggle. When had he last heard her giggle, if ever? Wanting the giddy mood to continue, he dared her to race him and darted away.

"I won!" Bones exclaimed when she caught up to him at the coffee cart.

"What do you mean, you won? I got here first!"

"You took off before me by approximately two seconds, which means you were both mentally and physically prepared before you accelerated."

He fought the urge to grin. "Nah, nah, you're not going to science your way to a win, here."

The next thing Booth knew, he was inviting himself to accompany her to a lecture on the Peloponnesian War. Valentine's Day had changed things. One moment he'd been shooting a red paper valentine to shreds, and the next he and Bones had been wielding Tommy Guns, laughing and spouting dialogue from old ganster movies. He and his partner were bringing out the best in each other, the way it was supposed to be.

He'd felt happy. The stupid, heavy weight on his chest had lifted. It had lifted again when he had seen her running on the mall. Maybe, if they went to the stupid lecture together, the weight wouldn't come crashing down on him.

Instead, they got called in to a murder case in which Caroline kept accusing him of flirting and Bones kept comparing him to Broadsky and acting like murderer-bait. While tracking down the sniper, Booth asked Bones to stay in the car. Instead, she twirled in front of it, basically daring Broadsky to shoot. Booth had felt all the weight slam down on his chest.

The pressure had only eased later, when they were discussing the freshly-closed case and Brennan feared her explanation would be too complex for Booth.

"Why don't you try to say it in teeny, tiny words?"

"Oh. Okay. Broadsky is bad," she said slowly, as though he were hearing-impaired. "You are good. That's as simply as I can put it."

He chuckled dryly. "You don't believe in absolutes like good or bad, alright. You think it's where people stand."

"From where I stand, you are good. Broadsky is bad."

"Thanks for standing there, Bones."

"I'm standing right beside you, Booth. Like always. Like I always will. I'm being metaphoric, of course…because we are currently sitting."

"Thank goodness, because I thought I'd shrunk."

"That's funny, because you made a joke based on relative position, which goes back, thematically to our discussion of situational morality!"

"Ha! Ha-ha, that's not why it's funny," Booth replied.

"Tell me another one!"

Later, when he is alone, the weight might come crashing down on him again. Maybe he would be angry at Rebecca or Kate or Bones-maybe at all three. Maybe he will be angry at Sweets for messing with Bones and Booth's partnership in the first place or for making Booth feel so inadequate that he'd bought a ring that was somewhere at the bottom of the Potomac. Or maybe he could just picture this moment, or when they'd been driving down the road in the SUV calling the polygamist a "bonehead," or Valentines Day. When she'd opened the large, brown cask containing the Tommy guns, he'd thought, "God, I love her" and laughed. What had started off his most miserable Valentine's Day had ended up being his favorite. It had been her favorite, too.


	12. Chapter 12

**Enhanced with some actual dialogue from season 6, Episode 16.**

You were not trying to be provocative in the elevator. You really had just been demonstrated that Booth's shoulders were wider than your hips. But then his face ended up pressed to your chest, which was awkward. You decided ignoring it was the best bet.

Later, when Sweets forced Booth to talk about your partnership, the awkwardness soared. Your right side was pressed to Booth's left side as he yelled, "It is OVER," and slammed the bag of peas against the metal of the elevator. The frozen green spheres rattled down the stairs and elevator shaft, and you winced and shrunk away.

After Sweets left, you offered Booth a massage to help his strained back. Well, offered is perhaps the wrong word. You badgered him into allowing you to give him a massage. Your right hand was on his left thigh, your left hand on his right knee, pressing it down toward his chest to relieve the tension in his back. His knee wouldn't go quite far enough for optimal release, so you began to massage the back of his upper thigh with your thumbs, the fingers of your right hand resting at the juncture of his thigh and groin.

Touching him this way was strangely satisfying, but not for the usual reasons. It was not merely that you were proud of your proficiency as a masseuse, nor was the satisfaction sexual. It was because Booth trusted you. He was allowing you to touch him, even in parts of his body that were culturally considered intimate.

Then he giggled, exclaiming, "Ohh, just…stop, you know, because…" his eyes darted around. "before Sweets comes back."

"Why?"

"Well…" He glanced pointedly at his crotch.

"Ooooh! I understand. You think he'll interpret our physical contact as yet another sign that we…"

Booth rolled his eyes and sighed in mock exasperation. "Yeah, yeah, but I gotta tell ya', wow, my back feels so much better. Thanks."

And then, everything changed. Booth had launched a discussion of the feelings you had in the past, your mutual attraction and probable sexual compatibility. The conversation had ended, however, with and agreement that you were romantically incompatible. That might have ended your hopes of becoming a couple, but you ended up in his apartment, eating stadium food and making wishes that you sent into the universe as particles of carbon, whiffs of smoke.

* * *

"A time could come when you aren't angry anymore and I'm strong enough to risk losing the last of my imperviousness. Maybe then we could try to be together," she'd said.

"I am going to write down a date. A guess what that time is. I want you to do the same," he replied.

Booth had peeked that night when they wrote their dates on the hot dog wrappers and burned them. Okay, if he were being honest, it had been a trick. Well, the wish thing was real. He really had done that as a kid. He'd gotten he idea from lighting candles at church. At Sunday School he'd learned that it was wrong to pray for specific things when lighting candles in the cathedral, but he figured wishing by burning paper at home wasn't the same. Praying was asking God for help. Wishing was a way of letting the universe know what was in your heart.

After solving the case, they'd managed to find a local convenience store open and scraped together stadium food: beer, hotdogs, pretzels, peanuts, Krackerjacks and popcorn. They munched while reassembling Booth's stadium seats. At first they'd worked by candle light, sitting as close as possible for warmth. When the power had come back on, they hadn't bothered to blow out the candles.

She was back in his life and in his home, and it occurred to Booth that he couldn't stand for the uncertainty between them to stretch out indefinitely. They'd already used up their honesty quotient for the day, though. Hell, they'd been more direct and honest with each other in one day that in the first four years of their partnership combined.

So he'd indulged in a little subterfuge. He'd written "ASAP" on his paper. He didn't know when it would happen, but he wanted it to be soon. He'd almost written, "Now," but a guy who was really ready now wouldn't be throwing frozen peas at shrinks who were only trying to help.

Bones had written "April 9, 2011" on hers, though there was smaller writing below that he couldn't quite catch. It was kind of a perfect date: soon, but just long enough for him to get his life together. It would be toward the end of the Cherry Blossom Festival. The city would be overrun with tourists, but the romantic in Booth loved the idea of getting together with Bones after all this time with the whole Basin covered in white and pink blossoms. The lush setting would also help him tone down his tendency toward grand gestures. Bones would probably be freaking out enough without him going overboard.


	13. Chapter 13

**Thanks for reviewing, ForeverNight101 and Southun Lady!**

It seemed utterly inconceivable, but your Lancelot has called it quits. How could this be? You'd been sure that he was going to propose. Not that you were looking, but his browser history included several fine restaurants and jewelry stores.

"Besides, Agent Booth says I'm too young to get married, and…"

"Agent Booth? You're breaking up with me because of something Agent BOOTH said?"

"Not exactly. He just got me thinking…"

"Because Agent Booth wouldn't know love if it bit him in the gluteus maximus, Lancelot! He chose that ridiculous little reporter over Dr. Brennan!"

"I can't talk about my patients, but that's not exactly how I'd characterize…you what, wait, let's talk about Dr. Brennan for a second. You left me because you thought it was what Dr. Brennan would do."

"And I was right, as it was what she eventually _did!_"

"Then would you take her as a romantic role model? Because she agrees we're too young."

"Lance, Dr. Brennan is good at many things, but maintain and advancing a romantic relationship in a timely manner is not one of them. That does not diminish my respect for her, though, as she didn't have the kind of role models I grew up with. My parents fell in love in high school and got married when they were 20. They're still in love today. They hold hands in the grocery store and at church…"

He looks at you like you're crazy. You hate moments like these. At first, you could trust him to be the one person who never gave you that look—the look that said, 'You are too much. Too perky, too smart, too loud." But it's none of the unusual things about you that he rejects. He reacts this way to the part of your life that is the most mundane, idyllic, and beyond reproach: your big, happy, close family. You tried to invite him to family events—birthday parties, christenings, barbecues. He went to one and fidgeted the whole time. You could never talk him into attending another.

On one level, you understand. You've seen the scars on his back, and he told you the basics. But he also told you without words—but with nonverbal signals not even you could ignore— that you would never understand.

And now he's breaking up with you. AGAIN.

"You want love so badly, you want a family. What's wrong with mine?" Your faces feels warm as your voice breaks and you begin to sob.

"Nothing!" he says, pulling you to his chest. His long, skinny fingers tangle in your hair. Your ear is pressed to his lean chest, and you can hear his heartbeat. "But you can't just skip to where you want to be."

* * *

Booth barged into Lance Sweets' office, like always. "Sweets, it's about Bones. I need your help."

"You know what?" Sweets replied, "I think I should recommend a new therapist for you two. You don't respect my opinions, especially where Dr. Brennan is concerned, and I've been thinking about it. I've lost the emotional objectivity necessary to be an effective therapist for you."

"What? No! We don't want a new shrink. Come one, Sweets. Yeah, so we give you a hard time, I get mad and I yell at you sometimes, but we also tell you more than we used to, right? When we first met you, you were just some shrink— some kid who was going to tell _me _how to act with Bones?

"But I've seen what you can do with suspects. You're good with Parker." Booth sighed. "You're even getting good with us. When you made us play that word-association game and Bones first admitted wanted a kid, I knew you were really good at your job. I mean, we'd talked about kids over and over, and she'd never admitted to wanting one."

"You used to talk about having kids a lot?"

"Not having kids with each other. Just the idea of having kids in general." Booth saw the enthralled look on the therapist's face. "Yeah, yeah, Sweets, don't get too excited. You already know you were right about us all along, we just weren't ready for it. That's why I'm here. Bones is almost ready, so now I just need to make sure _I'm_ really ready by the time _she's_ ready. So how do I get past Kate? How do I stop being so mad?"

Sweets wished he could point out how similar Booth's request was to Hodgins' request a few years back. The two men thought they were so different from each other. "Have you heard of the seven stages of grief?" he asked.

"Nobody died, Sweets."

"Well, in essence, a relationship died. The stages are Shock & Denial, Pain & Guilt, Anger & Bargaining, Depression & Loneliness, The Upward Turn, Reconstruction and Acceptance & Hope."

"That sounds like a lot more than seven. Anyway, I'm already in the Upward Turn, so let's go straight to Reconstruction. Building? Construction? That sounds good. Constructive, right?" he asked with a hopeful grin.

"Agent Booth, you can't just skip to where you want to be—not if you want your relationship with Dr. Brennan to be healthy. Just recently you've shown signs of step three, Anger and Bargaining. You've been hostile and seeking to lay blame."

"Yeah, well, that was before Bones and I had a talk the day of the blizzard."

"Oh, yeah?" Sweets asked, trying to play it cool.

"I mean, we're cool about that, right?"

"Of course," Sweets said with more certainty than he felt. Lance Sweets didn't like to admit it, even to himself, but he was desperate for Seeley Booth's approval.

"Well, some good came of it, so thanks." Sweets' eyes lit up. "That's why you can't give us some other shrink. You know what Bones told me? That she used to be impervious. Like nothing could touch her. And then you came along, just pick-pick-picking at us." His lips tightened a little as he said it, his voice a bit growly. "It bugged me. Sometimes I wanted to slug you.

"See, before that, we could ignore it. And did I hope it would change eventually? Yeah, but there was this part of me that knew—_knew _it would hurt like Hell. And it did. We ended up five thousand miles apart. But now we're here, alright? And it's partly because of you, making us come in here and ambushing us at the diner and…" he slumped down into one of the chairs facing Sweets's desk.

"Grilling you while you're trapped," Sweets guessed.

"Actually, I was going to say something else. It's that…you needed us, right? We can't…we're not good at needing people. When you need people, they have…" Booth's elbows rested on his knees, and he scrubbed his face with his hands.

"Power over you?" Sweets asked.

"Power over you," Booth returned, giving Sweets a look that reminded the therapist of shared scars. "But you needed us as much as we needed you."

"Wait, is this the baby duck thing?"

Booth laughed. "How did you know about that?"

"Dr. Brennan told me. She said it was 'based on something Dr. Wyatt said about us being a family.'"

"Attagirl, Bones," Booth said, beaming with pride.

"Why 'Attagirl'?" Sweets replied with a cautiously analytical tone.

"Because I'm proud of her."

"Obviously, but you're proud because?

Booth rolled his eyes. "Because apparently, she saw a moment when you needed to know you were loved, so—in her own way—she told you. Now stop fishing, Sweets. You know you're our guy. Help us out, already!"

"Okay, but you're not going to like it: just feel whatever you need to feel. Explore your feelings. Keep a journal or talk to me or your priest. Don't try to force it or rush it. It will happen in its own time. Look, you and Dr. Brennan? You won't miss this time."

"Is that your shrinky, Ouija-board prediction?"

"No. It's the kind of thing I'm not supposed to say as your shrink. I'm saying it as a friend. You held on for her the first five years. Now she's holding on for you."

"Thanks, Sweets," he said with a big smile, fondly slapping the psychiatrist on the back before rushing out of the room.

Sweets shook his head at his departing friend and smiled.


	14. Chapter 14

**AN: Thanks for the reviews, Musicnlyrics and, once again, SouthunLady. Warning: Some sexual content, but not graphic.**

You hear a noise in the night, and before your eyes are open, you have a gun in your hand, safety off, bullet in the chamber. When your eyes open, you thing you are dreaming, because Bones is standing at the foot of your bed the way she has in a million dreams. That's why you don't lower the gun right away.

"I'm sorry," she says. And now you know you're awake, but the adrenaline is still surging through your body. Vincent Nigel Murray died today with your hands pressed to his chest, slick, trying to hold in his blood. Broadsky took him out standing right next to you and Bones in the Jeffersonian—a place that had felt safe.

You realize you're pointing a gun at her. She gasped in surprise when you cocked the gun, but a second later the surprise faded. She is standing at gunpoint and she doesn't look scared or nervous or annoyed that you're still aimed at her. Why are you still aimed at her?

"Do you want me to put the gun away?" you ask.

"Yes."

She's there, standing beside your bed because she is sad and guilty and scared, but not scared of Broadsky. She's scared that her lost intern never knew that she cared and wanted him to stay. "He was looking at me, and he was saying, 'Don't make me leave.'" She understands so much more than she used to, but you forget sometimes how much she still has to learn.

You take her hand, and she sits beside you on the bed. She's not ready to hear your words about begging god for more time and the bargains desperate souls try to make with the universe.

She whispers so soft it's almost a sigh: "I just…" and you take her in your arms and lean back until your head hits the pillow.

"Yeah," you sigh back. A whisper would be too loud; she is not impervious. "That's why I'm here. I'm right here. I know it's hard."

* * *

They fell asleep in each other's arms. Booth slept better than he had in longer than he could remember. Brennan was not so lucky. She was wide awake in Booth's arms. They had shifted in their sleep to a spooning position. His right arm was wrapped around her, and his hand was loosely cupped around her left breast.

Brennan wasn't used to sleeping with someone in her bed. She'd never felt the need to literally sleep with sex partners. It was a recognized ritual within relationships—one she was willing to observe—but she had not been in a serious relationship since Sully.

Brennan and Booth had shared beds a few times when undercover. Sharing the one bed in Buck and Wanda's trailer had been awkward. They had fallen asleep easily enough, but she'd awoken not long after with his arms around her and leg between hers, and she'd felt aroused. Arousal was a natural response to REM, but this was a greater level of arousal than normally accompanied dreaming. She'd tried to ease out of Booth's arms without waking him, but it's not easy to sneak away from a former Army Ranger. He had bolted upright: "What's wrong?"

"Nothing, Booth. We just became entangled in our sleep."

"Okay," he'd replied cautiously, squinting at her as she moved to the far edge of the mattress.

Now, years later, she was tangled up with Booth again, aroused again, and still wondering what she should do. Things were different than they used to be. They'd admitted during the blizzard that they still wanted to be together someday. Her date was still a month away. She wondered what Booth had written. Even if he'd written today's date, it wouldn't be right, would it? Anthropologically speaking, Temperance Brennan knew that mourners often had intercourse as a response to grief. Her train of thought was broken when Booth pulled her closer. She could feel him pressed against her, and his hand involuntarily tightened around her breast, making her giggle.

"What?" he mumbled. His eyes opened and he looked down. He let her go as though she had scalded him and pulled away. "Sorry, Bones. I didn't mean to. Asleep! I was asleep, and…"

She laughed harder. "Booth," she said, "come back." He wrapped his arms around her again at the invitation, although he was careful to put his hand at her waist. "Thank you," she said, and squeezed his right hand with her left hand.

He propped himself up on his left elbow and scrutinized her face. "For what?"

"For bringing me here," she said.

The fingers of his left hand slipped under her neck. He let go of her hand and brought his right hand up to her cheek. Bones turned to face him. His face was so close to hers. All she had to do was lean forward a little and Booth closed the distance between them.

It was every bit as hot at they'd imagined it would be, which Booth had not thought possible. They were both very physical people with a lot of stamina who threw themselves into any endeavor full-tilt. Add to that true love and eight years of sexual tension, and it was a miracle they survived.

The weird thing was, for Booth is almost wasn't like a first time. For years he'd been subconsciously filing things away: how her body reacted when he touched her; sounds that meant happiness, excitement, nervousness or pain. He'd spent the better part of a decade decoding the body language of Dr. Temperance Brennan, and this was like his doctoral dissertation on the subject. He shook off the thought, realizing that he'd been spending hanging out with scientists too much, and focused on drawing a certain sigh from his Bones—one he had last heard when he'd given her a back massage when she'd had an ache. The sigh meant that, for once, Dr. Temperance Brennan was completely tension-free.

This was definitely a first for Brennan. In short, she was trying not to freak out. She had never, as Booth put it, "made love." On top of that, Booth had made it known on more than one occasion that he didn't approve of kinky sex. What if she accidentally did something he thought was kinky? The thought dissolved pretty quickly, though, as Booth's clever lips and hands drew a long, deep sigh from her. When she saw the self-satisfied grin on his face, Bones couldn't help but giggle, which got him laughing, too.

That was the one thing that surprised them both: how at this deep, important moment—the one they'd both fought against and dreamed of—they could relax. Tomorrow they would have to sort it out: Vincent, Broadsky and what tonight meant for their partnership. In this moment, though, they could laugh and touch.

Booth thought of the promises he'd made to Bones in the past about love breaking the laws of physics. Tonight he was going to show her. Brennan was thinking how at-home she felt in Booth's arms, how needless her worries had been, and how she wanted to give Booth the best climax he'd ever had.


	15. Chapter 15

**AN: Thanks again, SouthunLady.**

**Y'all, I've been writing this story for almost a year, and it's time to wrap it up! For a while, the real writers had things so tangled that I was just depressed and stumped by the state of B&B. But now, SPOILER, there's the pregnancy! I love that, but it means either 1- Brennan used Booth's frozen sperm, which is crazy (but I wouldn't put it past Hart Hanson & co.), 2- They had sex that one time but haven't been romantic since or 3- they have been romantic since, and Brennan clarifying that Booth is the father was either her being overly cautious or was clumsy exposition only for our benefit. And how much time passed between episodes? GAH! I wrote this scene three different ways before I could get one that felt realistic. Sheesh. **

**P.S. Please don't get mad that Brennan drinks a beer while one day pregnant. She doesn't know! **

* * *

The phone rings and the sun is higher than it should be. Your lover is soft and warm in your arms—this is the best possible way to wake up, but then you realize the situation: you're late for work, and there's still a killer on the loose—a killer who shoots through walls. The apartment is no protection, really. Your best chance for survival is to get back to work and catch the bastard.

You both spring out of bed cursing the late hour and rush through your morning routines. While she showers, you brew coffee and chomp on a donut while making her some oatmeal. Then she eats while you shower and shave. You both get dressed quickly, then ride in your SUV, just listening to the radio for once. She sings enthusiastically with Joan Jett and you grin.

You drop her at the Jeffersonian, suddenly feeling more nervous than on your first date ever with Mindy Coletti back in ninth grade. What if last night messed up everything? But as she's walking away, she looks back and flashes a gorgeous smile—a smile promising you that everything happens eventually.

* * *

"Sweetie, seriously? You and Booth…finally…"

"Had intercourse. Yes."

Angela made a gagging face at her best friend's choice of words. "And?"

"It was very satisfying, as I'd suspected it would be."

"Okay, that's not what I meant, but now that you bring it up: DETAILS!"

"I don't think Booth would like that. What _did_ you mean?"

"I meant, what does this mean? What now?"

"I don't know. We didn't actually discuss it. We just went to sleep and slept in. Booth swears he set his alarm correctly, but I suspect he set it to P.M. When we woke up, we had to rush to get ready for work."

"I'm sorry, but after we've-been-in-love-for-years-but-now-we're-done-with-denial sex, you make the time to talk! And I saw Booth drop you off. Couldn't you have talked about it in the car? Was the commute awkward?"

"No," Brennan replied, frowning slightly. Angela's words were worrying her that something had gone wrong and Brennan just hadn't realized. "I was singing along with the radio, and Booth was smiling and drumming on the steering wheel."

Angela relaxed a little and smiled. That didn't sound like denial. It sounded like Booth and Brennan just being themselves, having fun together. "Sweetie, that sounds really nice."

Brennan's face brightened. "But now we really should get back to work."

"And I should go apologize to Hodgins. Jack looked so excited when he came in. I feel bad for yelling at him, but some news can wait and some news can't! Speaking of which, are you sure I can't get any details?"

Brennan's only reply was a wicked smile.

* * *

Booth and Brennan left Vincent Nigel-Murray's mini-memorial arm-in-arm and proceeded to the Founding Fathers. They sat at the bar, turned on their stools to face each other, each nursing a beer.

"When Kate left me, I was so mad, right? I went to Sweets and he said I was going through the stages of grief. I needed to work through Shock & Denial, Pain & Guilt, Anger & Bargaining, Depression & Loneliness, The Upward Turn, Reconstruction and Acceptance & Hope."

"I hate psychology," she said, but her tone was less convincing than it used to be.

"Yeah, I know you do. But he was right. The last time we were here, I was mad and I took it out on you. I'm sorry for that."

She took his hand. "It's okay, Booth. You were hurting."

"Yeah, just like you're hurting now. Sometimes when we're in pain, we do things that we wouldn't otherwise. Things we regret, or…"

"I don't regret making love with you, Booth." It felt strange to use that phrase, but she knew it was the one he needed to hear.

"Me neither, Bones," he replied, subconsciously drawing slow circles on her inner wrist with his thumb. "But Sweets also said you can't just skip steps to where you want to be—not if we want our relationship to be healthy."

"Skipped steps? Seeley, it took us eight years!"

"_Seeley?" _he asked with a gentle smile. "Whoa, am I in trouble?"

"I just think the steps we've taken were excessive, as opposed to insufficient."

"Yeah, I see your point,_ Temperance_." She raised her left eyebrow at him, and he laughed. "What do you think should happen now?"

"I don't know," she replied. "I don't have much experience with romantic relationships. My last boyfriend sailed away. It was supposed to be for a few months, but I never saw him again. My prior serious relationship with Peter did not end well. He broke into my apartment to reclaim his television, said I was 'cold,' and attempted a booty call."

"But not in that order," Booth said.

"In precisely that order!" she replied.

He couldn't help but laugh, and Brennan snatched her hand away. "Hey, don't get mad. My last few major relationships went down in flames, too."

"I miss Kate," Bones admitted. Booth gave a terse nod. "And my sunglasses. I didn't realize they were limited edition when I gave them to her."

Booth laughed hard at that. "I bought her an engagement ring with a giant diamond, and when she left, I threw it in the Potomac!"

Brennan chortled in disbelief. "Booth, you could have sold it to recoup most of your expenses!"

"See, this is what I was talking about, Bones. When you're grieving you can make rash decisions. Oh, speaking of which, I have to make a confession: I peeked at your slip when we made our wishes. We're a month early."

"You looked? I told you not to!"

"I wanted to make sure I didn't mess it up. Sometimes the universe needs a little help."

"What date did you write?"

"I just wrote ASAP. But I think we should stick with the date you wrote. It'll give us some time to wrap up the case and make sure we've moved through our grief and we're ready to build."

"So we pretend nothing happened?"

"No, we don't pretend. We just take some time."

She groaned. "I'd rather have more sex now."

Booth chuckled. "Yeah, well, sex with you is amazing, but I'm more concerned about us being together for the next 50 years."

Brennan sighed. "I suppose that sounds good, too." They clinked beer glasses in agreement and sat side-by-side, talking late into the night.


	16. Chapter 16

**AN: Thanks for your loyal reviewing, Musicnlyrics and SouthunLady. I'm trying to wrap this up today, since I have the holiday off! (It's Memorial Day in the USA.) More chapters yet to come!  
**

* * *

Ever since that night with Booth, you've dreamt of the circus. Sometimes you dream of performing: You stand against the board as Buck throws knives that slice fruit from your head, shave tassels from your dress, and break necklaces that hang at your throat. The beads scatter, glinting in the light. Wanda is never afraid. 

Other nights, you dream you are back in the mobile home. You and Buck are rocking it back and forth, but not by pushing on the walls. You would think these dreams would be your favorite, but no.

The best are your dreams of just spending time with the other carnies in Bingham's Circus of Wonders. Buck makes peace with the clowns. He works out every day with Magnum. Madame Nina is your best friend, and reads your palm. She predicts you and Buck will have a long, happy life and many children.

There are no killers and no guns. The past does not haunt. Fear does not get the best of you. You love the circus and the act and each other. You are Buck and Wanda Moosejaw, the best barber act running. Together you travel on and on, to whatever waits just beyond the horizon.

* * *

Three weeks had gone quickly. Brennan, Booth and the rest of the Jeffersonian staff had been busy making sure all their documentation was in order for Caroline Julian to prosecute Broadsky. They were also trying to prepare for Angela and Jack's impending maternity and paternity leave.

Angela was getting impatient for the baby to arrive, but they received a murder case that served as a distraction: a body jammed into the pinsetter of a local bowling alley. Brennan gave Angela a reassuring hug before leaving the office, but the hug hurt Brennan's chest.

She pondered the soreness as she drove to the bowling alley. Her bra had felt a bit tight that morning, but Brennan had assumed she might have gained a few pounds, as she hadn't had time to jog recently. However, she hadn't been eating much the last few days, due to slight nausea. Weight gain also wouldn't explain her more-frequent urination. Increased Human Chorionic Gonadoropin levels would result in breast tenderness, though, and a swollen uterus could create pressure on the bladder. She pulled over to breathe for a moment. She was pregnant.

It was too early to determine skeletal shifts, so to confirm her diagnosis, Brennan stopped at a drugstore and bought a box of early pregnancy tests sensitive enough to pick up the low levels of hCG present before a missed menstrual cycle. Then she tucked them into her purse and drove to meet Booth at the bowling alley.

Brennan was relieved to find that the sight and smell of decomposing flesh didn't exacerbate her nausea. She'd almost needed to vomit after walking past the fresh seafood section of Whole Foods the night before, but this seemed normal. Booth smelled a little better to her than usual, but that was the only difference she detected. After performing her first perusal of the body, she ordered the entire machine sent to the Jeffersonian.

* * *

"There's something weird here. You're almost polite to each other. What is it, you having a fight?" Max asked. Booth found it ironic that he'd invited Max to the diner to question him, yet Booth felt like the one getting grilled.

The partners had managed to avoid any of their friends or family discerning a change in their relationship—well, except for Angela, who winked at Booth every chance she got. No one had caught on until Max Brennan at the diner. Booth and Bones thought they'd managed to convince him nothing was amiss.

Then they'd rushed back to the FBI to scrape together disguises and were reuniting with Max outside the bowling alley just in time for the tournament.

"Whoa, what's with the hair on you two?" Max asked.

"Is it not good? The FBI officer who provided our costuming swore it was perfect," Tempe told her father.

"It's a little over-the-top. On the other hand, if someone just caught a glimpse of you two when you were here looking at the body, they probably wouldn't recognize you right now. So, what are your aliases?"

"Buck Moosejaw. Nice to meetcha," Booth said.

"And I'm Wanda Scallion."

"How did you two meet?"

"The circus," both replied.

"Kind of a weird back-story. What do you do, Buck?"

"I'm a barber."

"No one will believe it with that scraggly mullet."

"Not that kind of barber, Dad. 'Barber' is carnie nomenclature for a knife-thrower. Our act is quite good."

"Wow, honey. You're getting good at this! I'm a human lie detector, and I'd swear you're telling the truth. Of course, Booth here knows better than to throw knives of Max Keenan's little girl."

"I am not a little girl, and he most certainly…" Booth popped a stick of gum into her mouth, midsentence.

"We're getting close to the entrance, Wanda. Watch yer accent." Then he whispered, "And let's not tell your dad about the knives, okay? I'd like to make it out of here alive."

* * *

They'd been bowling for hours, and Max had been surreptitiously observing the partners at work. He couldn't recall when he'd ever seen his daughter so happy, and he doubted it was the character, or even Temperance's love of undercover work. He suspected it had more to do with the Fed. Booth and Tempe were squabbling less than they used to, but they were also sneaking fewer looks at each other. Booth wasn't resting his hands on the small of her back. Tempe wasn't touching his forearms as much. On the other hand, they were doing a lot more laughing than usual.

"If you want to make it look real, maybe you should be a little more affectionate with each other," Max suggested, watching their reaction hawkishly.

Booth's face shifted into a grin and he cocked his head almost imperceptibly, calling her closer. For a second, uncertainty flashed over Tempe's face before she sauntered over and wrapped an arm around Booth's neck, presenting a cheek to her partner. He smooched her cheek and she giggled as his grin broke into a full-fledged smile. They both laughed as she went to question Hercules. Max Brennan continued to stare at Booth. "WHAT?" Booth snapped for the second time that day. Max just smiled cryptically and rolled away in his wheelchair.

Several rounds later, Max found his daughter examining an adolescent's laptop without a warrant. It did his heart good to know that Tempe had gotten more from him than her love of science. The girl had a gift for grift.

"If Buck and I ever have a child, she will _not_ turn out like Amber."

"Yeah, Temperance, it's just us monkeys. You don't have to keep up your cover story."

"I find it helpful to remain in character."

He understood. Sometimes it's easier to become your cover. Matthew Brennan was a much simpler guy to be than Max Keenan. Matt Brennan was just a science teacher. Sure, he had to look the other way sometimes when people committed evil acts, but he had a nice, quiet life with his wife and kids. He didn't have to think about the band of murderous bank robbers who wanted him dead or the Feds who wanted him behind bars. Deep down, though, he wasn't really that guy. Max the vigilante had always been there, just under the surface. And now…now he was lucky enough to have found a happy medium. He was Max Brennan: not perfect, but not spending his whole life pretending, either.

He hoped his daughter would someday manage the same.


	17. Chapter 17

**AN: People, I think we're one chapter from the end! **

**Apologies to the official writers of Bones for all the times I poached their dialogue (not to mention the entire Bones universe and all the characters in it). Also to Timothy Smith, songwriter of Poco's "Keep on Tryin'."**

* * *

You are walking the tightrope, the long bar in your hands. You try to curl your feet like she did. The ground seems so far away. The wire digs into your feet. "Ow. My cuboids!"

"You used the correct term!" Bones exclaims proudly from where she watches on the ground.

"What am I doing up here, Bones?"

"Trying to balance," she replies.

"What if I fall?"

"There's a net."

"What about you?"

"I'm here, too."

"Then why am I still up here?"

Because you want it to be perfect. Because you want to get it right. But that would just leave you on another platform with her still far away. Below you, she sings, and her husky voice drifts up to you:

"I feel so satisfied when I can see you smile. I want to confide in all that is true, so I'll keep on trying; I'm through with lying. Just like the sun above, I'll come shining through. Oh, yes, I'll keep on trying; I'm tired of crying. I've got to find a way to get on home to you."

You awaken alone.

* * *

After leaving the maternity ward, Booth and Bones went for a walk down the cool, quiet streets of D.C. She was frowning, which Booth didn't understand. He couldn't seem to find the right words to comfort his partner.

"[…] They've got a healthy baby, alright, they love each other. This is the happiest day of their lives, okay? What?"

Her face went blank, and she took a deep breath. "I'm…I'm pregnant." His face was now stony. It took a second for her words to sink in, another for him to believe them. Even then, he was cautious and unready to let himself hope. Bones was clearly scared, so nothing was promised. "You're the father," she added.

Somehow with those words and her tone, he knew that she was keeping it. In about eight months, they would have a baby. He beamed at his partner, and she finally smiled in return, her blue eyes shining. Booth wanted to grab her and kiss her. He wanted to beg her to marry him or at least move in. On the other hand, he didn't want to mess up their relationship or frighten her any worse than she already was. He was standing on that damn wire again. Screw it. He decided to jump.

He wrapped his arms around her, hugging her close until her feet were just off the ground, and spun them both until she burst into laughter. Then he set her back on the pavement, took her face in his hands and kissed her, deep and gentle.

He looked her straight in the eyes. "You are going to be an amazing mom."

"You…you think so?" she stammered.

"I know it. I'm basing this on scientific observation."

"Really?" she asked sarcastically.

"Really. You were good with Andy. Parker loves you. You're a writer and scientist who speaks seven languages, so you will be excellent at helping with homework. You don't mind nasty smells, so dirty diapers will be a snap. You like gross stuff, and most kids love gross stuff. You're athletic and a health food nut, so you'll make sure he or she grows up healthy. You love to act, so pretending will be fun. You have a pretty voice, so you'll be good at lullabies. You give great hugs."

Bones started crying when Booth mentioned pretending and lullabies. Until then, he'd mostly listed clinical acts of motherhood—the things she knew she could handle. Now he was alleviating her greatest fear: that she was too cold to be a good mom. Her own mother had been so bright and warm. Booth could feel the warmth in Bones. His words painted a picture of her with a tiny person playing and laughing on the floor, or with that precious baby nestled in her arms as she sang, rocking the child to sleep. Hugging her own little one.

"You're gonna be great, Bones, and I'm going to be with you every step of the way."

"I don't know how to do this," she admitted, her voice thick with tears.

"We don't know how to do _any_ of this," he admitted. "We can't even figure out how to date like normal people."

"Booth, that isn't very comforting."

"I know, but we promised not to lie to each other. I'm all in, alright? We'll figure it out together. It's going to be _us_, right?"

"Right," she replied, dashing away her tears. "Let's go home."

"Together or separately?"

"Together, please. I don't care whether it's my place or yours. You aren't worried about skipping steps anymore?"

He leaned down until their foreheads were touching. "Bones, you're having my baby. No use locking the barn door after the horse has bolted."

"I don't know what that means."

He laughed and explained, "It means we're already hopelessly out of order, but we're a done deal, so let's stop getting in our own way."

"Really? For such a simple idiom, it has a great deal of nuance."

"I may have stretched the meaning a little."


	18. Chapter 18

**You write a story in which each chapter begins with a second-person scene. Then, one chapter away from the story's end, you can't come up with one that feels valid: no reflections, no dream sequences. You just want to get to the scene, so you cheat and write the Author's Note in the second person. You hope the readers are enjoying your story. ;)  
**

* * *

Just as Sweets was getting home from meeting little Michael Hodgins, his phone had rung and Booth and Brennan had scheduled a 9 a.m. appointment. He continually begged Booth and the Jeffersonian forensic team to set appointments instead of barging in, but this one made him nervous.

He sat across from the partners, pen and notepad in hand, and put on his most professional veneer. "How can I help you two?"

"I'm pregnant," Brennan said.

"It's mine," Booth added.

"You used the sperm? Oh, man! I mean, we discussed it, and I thought we agreed you wouldn't…"

"Whoa, whoa, whoa, Sweets. It was the old fashioned way, and that's all we're going to say about that," Booth said, jaw tight.

"Awesome!" Sweets replied with a bright smile before catching Booth's incredulous expression and restoring his calm. "Got it. Okay…have you made any decisions?"

"We've decided to cohabitate," Brennan said.

"Well, yeah, and we're together. You know, a couple," Booth clarified.

"Wow. That's…that's great!" Sweets' face broke into another of those grins that made him look 18. "So you're here because you want me to get your supervisors to let you stay partners."

"That was one objective of this session," Brennan agreed, "But there are others."

"Yeah, Bones and I have some very different opinions on stuff, and we thought you could help us…"

"Mediate?" Sweets asked.

"Exactly."

"Okay." Lance was honored that his friends had come to him, and he thought it over carefully, wanting to help the partners transition smoothly into their romantic relationship. "Well, one biggie is religion. Booth will probably want to have your child baptized and raised in the church. How do you feel about that, Dr. Brennan?"

"I realize that religion is important to Booth, so I will allow baptism, although I cannot participate in the ceremony, as I refuse to make oaths that I don't believe in. Booth can take our child to church as long as I can educate him or her on other belief systems, including atheism."

Booth winced a bit, but agreed that seemed fair. The next topic was finances. "I propose we each keep separate checking for our Jeffersonian and FBI paychecks, and a joint account for our publishing revenues."

"That's crazy, Bones. You can keep your book money."

"Actually, this would make me feel better. Once I realized Angela deserved a portion of the profits, I knew you did, too; you provided invaluable insight into the FBI and investigating crimes. However, my lawyer said it's illegal to pay an active FBI Special Agent for consulting. It's our money— money I couldn't have made without you."

"Okay, I'll agree to that if you'll agree to this: no more crazy fieldwork."

"What? You can't seriously expect…"

"I _can_ seriously expect! I want you to take a minute to remember all the times we were out in the field and some crazy person shot at you, stabbed you, kidnapped you, tried to blow you up...now picture that same scenario with a baby in the mix. No way, Bones."

"But you said we would stay partners!"

"Look, going to the initial scene should be safe, and you can help with interrogations here at the FBI. It's just until the baby is born. Then, if you want to ride around with me like we did before, you can. Besides, you're always telling me that too much forensic work has left you with a backup of remains in limbo."

"It's called 'bone storage,' Booth." She sighed. "You argument is logical. I accept."

"Wow. Awesome, you guys. What about living arrangements? Have you discussed where you will live? What's the timeline?"

"Booth and I agreed that we'd like to select a domicile together. I want to stay in the city."

"And I want a place with at least a little yard, so we're gonna start looking at townhouses. As soon as we find the right one? Bam! Be ready to help us move."

Sweets cringed at the thought of transporting those stadium seats again. "Okay, then I have just one concern. This one's touchy, so bear with me, okay? Dr. Brennan, you've always stated that you find the institute of marriage arcane. Booth has always been a fan of marriage. So my question is, Dr. Brennan, would you ever consider getting married, and if not, Agent Booth, can you accept that?"

"We have had this discussion before," Dr. Brennan began. "However, my views on love and parenthood have changed, so I would like to hear a non-theologically-based argument for marriage."

"Non-theologically-based?" Booth replied.

"Agent Booth, just try to avoid the words 'God,' 'Bible,' 'commandment' and 'sin,' and I'm sure you'll do fine," Sweets assured him.

"Okay." Booth took a deep breath. "I love you and you love me, right? And we've been tested a thousand ways—by each other, by our jobs, by the world. The hardest part was getting past our own traps, but we did it, right? Alright, so I wanted to marry you when we met eight years ago. I love you even more now. Plus, we're having a kid together. No matter what, that means you and me working together for life.

"One time you told me that a scientist's expectations for an experiment can affect the outcome. Well, that's what getting married is. It's skewing the outcome. It's saying, 'We want this experiment to be a success and we're going to fight for it.' It's standing in front of the people we love and saying, 'The odds of a marriage lasting may only be 50-50, but we're going to make it.'"

Brennan beamed at him. "That was much better than your prior argument. I especially appreciated your inclusion of the research bias analogy."

"And if it helps," Sweets added, "I did some calculations based on census data. Six percent of people getting married at age 31 or older with college degrees and one child were predicted to be divorced over the next five years. That's in the average risk range, and impressive compared with the general population's 20 percent rate five years out."

"Really? Only six percent?"

"And women age 35 to 39 account for only 5.1 percent of all women getting divorced."

"Wait a minute, Bones! I'm pouring out my heart here, and Sweets wins you over with a census and a calculator?"

"It's cumulative, Booth! You gave an excellent reasoning for marriage: if our relationship is an experiment, then getting married is the equivalent of experimenter's bias—a way to skew for the outcome we seek: a successful and lasting relationship. Sweets' data supports the idea that our experiment would be successful."

"Can we stop referring to a holy sacrament as 'an experiment?'"

"You started it," she replied.

"So back to my original question?" Sweets asked.

"I accept Booth's argument for marriage in general as valid, although I think we should try dating and living together before discussing the matter further."

"You know what? That's better than I was hoping for, so I'm gonna call this one a win! Thanks, Sweets!"

"Yes, Sweets. You were very efficient today." The partners rose in unison and started to leave.

"Wait, guys. Thanks for coming in and trusting me to help. Plus, you know, for calling first. I'm glad I could be of assistance. Now, I was wondering if you could help me with something."

"Like what?" Booth asked.

"I asked Special Agent Shaw out for next Friday, but for some reason, whenever I'm around her, I say the wrong thing."

Booth and Brennan plopped back into their chairs, suspecting this might take a while.

"What does that have to do with us?" Brennan asked.

"She said yes, but I may have made it sound like a group thing."

"Oh, and if you don't have a group when she gets there…" Booth said.

"I'd seem wicked creepy. Yeah."

"Well, we'll help you out, Sweets!" Booth replied. "The Jeffersonian team can be your wingmen."

"There's a hitch, Agent Booth. You see, last week I heard Genny talking about how much she loves to sing, so the date? It's for karaoke."


	19. Chapter 19

**AN: We made it to the end! Sorry, subscribers: this isn't a new chapter. It's the end! It always was, I just didn't label it properly. I went back to fix that and a missing apostrophe. **

* * *

**This intro is brought to you by the times I thought I was hanging out, but then the guy's appearance and/or smell alerted me that I was actually on a date.**

**I'm setting the Gemma Arrington case in 2003, because the alternative is that the Bones universe is a year ahead of us, and that makes my head explode. Also, I don't like song fics, yet I've written a chapter set in a karaoke bar, centered upon a song that I hadn't thought of in a decade, but that popped into my head and wouldn't leave me alone while I was writing the last two or three chapters. Props to the writers of all the songs quoted here, especially Randy Newman, who wrote "Feels Like Home to Me."**

**Please enjoy.**

* * *

You are on a date. It was supposed to be a 'group thing" with people from work, but Dr. Lance Sweets is wearing jeans, a cute button-front shirt and a black leather touring jacket instead of one of his normal suits. Plus, he smells good. _Date _good.

At least it is, as Lance had claimed, a group thing. You're surrounded by about a dozen people who laugh as they sip their drinks and flip through the books of available songs. You're relieved to see Agent Booth there until you realize that you're about to have a date in front of your supervisor—a man you desperately want to impress. _No pressure._

Everyone greets you warmly. Then the emcee calls for "Team Jeffersonian," and in a bizarre spectacle, Lance, Booth and about half the group take to the stage to perform a rousing rendition of "Lime in the Coconut," after which a few of them start crying. It's all so weird. You are tempted to leave, but then Agent Booth leans toward you.

"I submitted a song for you. It's perfect for an FBI agent!" he says. You do not like the glint in his eye.

"Genny Shaw, you're up!" the emcee exclaimed.

Your heart is pounding and your palms are sweating as you take to the stage, but then the guitar intro kicks in and you giggle. _"One way or another I'm gonna find ya. I'm gonna getcha getcha getcha getcha!"_

As always, you're more confident on stage, and Booth has picked a great tune. The audience—especially "Team Jeffersonian"—is cheering, and Lance is looking at you like you're a rock star. Maybe you are glad it is a date after all.

* * *

"I don't know what to sing. We already did 'Coconut.'" Sweets muttered to himself.

"Let Genny pick," Angela suggested. "She'll love it. It will let her set the tone for the evening. She can either pick something cute—keeping the date light—or something cool or seductive. You can learn a lot about a person by the music they pick."

Just then, the emcee called for Clark Edison. He walked up to the microphone and purred, "This is for Nora. _'I been really trying, baby, to hold back this feelin' for so long. And if you feel…like I feel, baby…then come on, oh, come on. Whoo, let's get it on!_'"

The whole karaoke bar exploded in catcalls. Nora couldn't look away from her boyfriend, whose velvety voice was stoking the fires of every couple in the room. Sweets decided to take Angela's advice and handed over the book to Genny, who grinned, revealing dimples in her cheeks. Sweets was suddenly more smitten, which he had not thought possible. She scribbled her pick on a slip of paper.

"Billy Joel? Really?" he asked.

"It's my secret shame," she deadpanned.

After agreeing to help Sweets, Booth and Brennan had invited all the squints (except Daisy—too awkward) and a few of Booth's colleagues. Everyone except Colin Fisher and Payton Perotta had made it, and several people had brought dates. It was one of the first gatherings they'd had since Vincent's death, and everyone was glad to be together for a happy evening.

The group chatted as some of the bar's other patrons performed. Sweets sneaked glances and Booth and Brennan. They'd decided to keep the pregnancy to themselves until the first trimester was over, but that they would soon reveal their relationship to their friends. Sweets was curious to see how they would interact now. Thus far, the answer was: the same as always. He put his hand on her lower back. She touched him often when they talked. Their postures often mirrored each other, and they shared inside jokes.

Caroline Julian got up and sang a smoky rendition of "Fever" that had everyone cheering. Then it was Sweets' turn. Genny had chosen "Uptown Girl," which was, luckily, in his range.

"Wow, Sweets is very good," Brennan mused.

"I know," Angela replied. "You know, I'm seeing Sweets in a whole new light," she mused, sounding quite impressed.

"Really?" Hodgins replied, incredulous.

Sweets had command of the stage, mic-in-hand, and crooned, _"And when she's walking, she's looking so fine! And when she's talking, she'll say that she's mine!"_

Genny was riveted, and her face felt warm. She giggled. _Why am I giggling?_ she wondered.

Dr. Brennan leaned across the table. "Special Agent Shaw, as wing-person, I should inform you that Dr. Sweets holds two doctorates and received both a Fulbright and a Rhodes scholarship. However, if—as many woman are—you find yourself more attracted to musicians than scholars, it may interest you to know that in addition to singing, Sweets is quite proficient at the piano."

"Reeeally," she replied with a raised eyebrow and a grin. "Thanks for the tip, Dr. Brennan!"

"I like her," Brennan informed Booth.

"Me, too. You planning to sing?"

"Yes. I want to show Sweets that I'm not traumatized," she said with an eye-roll. "However, I find that I don't wish to sing something with the same air of frivolity as 'Girls Just Wanna Have Fun.'"

"Then follow your heart, Bones."

"You say that a lot. Do you remember what you told me during my dad's trial? 'You gotta put your head in neutral…'"

"And your heart in overdrive," he finished, smiling. "I remember."

Hodgins took to the stage. "Clark Edison, I see your Marvin Gaye...and raise you an Al Green."

Angela shook her head at her adorable, dorky husband. Then he began to sing their song: _"I…I'm so in love with you. Whatever you want to do…is alright with me. Cause you make me feel so brand new, and I want to spend my life with you."_

Just when Angela had thought her life couldn't get better, it did. This was one of the most perfect moments in her life. Her healthy two-week-old baby boy sleeping soundly at home, being watched over by Michelle. Angela was surrounded by friends, and her wonderful husband was serenading her with his tea-and-honey voice.

_"I'm sayin' since, baby, since we've been together—Ooo, loving you forever is what I need. Let me, be the one you come running to. I'll never be untrue. Ooo baby, Let's, let's stay together. Loving you whether, whether times are good or bad, happy or sad…"_

Brennan finally found the right song. "Heart in overdrive," she whispered as she jotted down her selection and turned it in at the bar.

Later, Arastoo sang an enthusiastic, though out-of-tune, "Satisfaction." Then Wendell sang "Love Shack" with Camille, Nora and Angela as backup singers.

"Booth, what does 'Tin roof, rusted' mean in this context? What relevance could oxidation possibly have in this case?"

"Bones, I haven't a clue," he said.

Then it was Brennan's turn to sing. Booth gave her hand a squeeze. She pulled a stool from the corner of the stage and sat in front of the microphone, arranging the hem of her empire-waist blue dress around her knees. A sweet, simple intro played as the title card was displayed: "Feels Like Home To Me—Bonnie Raitt."

Brennan began the song with her eyes closed: _"Something in your eyes makes me want to lose myself, makes me want to lose myself in your arms. There's something in your voice makes my heart beat fast. Hope this feeling lasts, the rest of my life."_

She opened her eyes and looked right at her partner. _"If you knew how lonely my life has been and how low I've felt so long. If you knew how I wanted someone to come along, and change my life the way you've done…"_

"Oh, Sweetie," Angela sighed. She began rifling through her purse for a pack of tissues. This song would have made her a wreck on an average day, but two weeks after giving birth, she was especially unprepared for her best friend's ballad. She found the tissues and swiped away at the tears streaming down her face.

"Wow," Camille added, stunned. "Got another?" Angela passed a tissue to Cam, who daintily dabbed the corners of her eyes. Paul smiled at this softer side of Cam.

Dr. Temperance Brennan was singing with her heart on her sleeve, and the group was riveted. Even bar patrons who didn't know the anthropologist had stopped their conversations to listen. Booth beamed at his Bones as she sang:

_"Feels like home to me—feels like home to me. Feels like I'm on my way back where I come from. Feels like home to me—feels like home to me. Feels like I'm on my way back where I belong."_

"Wait, so she…" Hodgins whispered to his wife.

"Yes," said with a sniffle.

"And he…"

"Yes!"

"How long have you known?"

"They had sex a month and a half ago, but as far as I know, nothing's happened since then," she whispered in annoyance.

"Wha-"

"Jack, honey, shh!" she hissed. "We don't want to miss this," she added more gently.

Brennan flashed Booth a smile— biggest and brightest that any of the interns had ever seen on their mentor's face. She took a deep breath and continued, _"If you knew how much this moment means to me, and how long I've waited for your touch. If you knew how happy you are making me—I've never thought I'd love anyone so much."_

"Well, I'll be damned," Caroline exclaimed softly, watching Booth watch Brennan.

_"Feels like home to me, feels like home to me. Feels like I'm on my way back where I come from. Feels like home to me, feels like home to me, feels like I'm on my way back where I belong. Feels like I'm on my way back where I belong."_

The bar burst into applause. Booth left his seat and stalked up to the slightly-raised stage. He crooked a finger to her, and when she was close enough, he helped her off the stage and into his arms.

"That's a lot of heart, Bones," he said and kissed her, slow and deep. She wrapped her arms around his neck and sunk into the kiss.

Angela had to slap a hand over her mouth to keep from squealing with joy. Then Brennan pulled away from Booth and cleared her throat. The idea of making out in front of her interns was not appealing. However, when they were seated at the table, she leaned against him, and he wrapped an arm around her shoulder.

Agent Shaw took in the gob-smacked faces around her. "I don't get it. He kissed his girlfriend. What's the big deal?" she asked, sotto voce.

"You just saw, basically, my greatest accomplishment," Sweets said.

"How is watching a couple making out a bigger accomplishment getting a Fulbright or a Rhodes, or than catching murderers?"

"Chérie, as far as I know, they weren't officially a couple until just now!" the eavesdropping Caroline Julian confided. "These two have been doing the will-they-won't-they waltz since they worked the Gemma Arrington case back in 2003, and catching bad guys is the only thing they do better than they flirt. Your Dr. Sweets' job was officially to make sure their partnership was working. He managed to mostly keep the FBI out of their business and, thus, out of our way. But I suspect he had _something _to do with Booth and the beautiful scientist finally getting their romantic act together."

"No comment. Doctor-patient confidentiality," Sweets replied with a smile.

"Mmmm-hmmm," she replied. "Well if you _did_ do something, you did good, kid. Sorry I told you to grow the hell up. Maybe childlike faith was required to deal with those hard-headed fools." Caroline's fond gaze at the couple belied her harsh words.

"And thanks for bringing me back to the FBI. For bringing us all back."

"I'll tell you what I told Booth: you got something magic, you don't scatter it to the ends of the Earth. You concentrate it in one place," she said before sauntering off to the bar.

To be honest, Sweets wasn't sure how much credit he could take for Booth and Brennan's relationship. They would have found their way to each other sooner or later; maybe it would have happened sooner. Years ago, he'd let Brennan think Booth was dead, and instead of opening her up emotionally, it had driven her further behind her walls. That decision ranked as his biggest regret. Still, over the years of (as Booth put it) peck, peck, pecking, Sweet had seen their communication change. They didn't use banter to avoid real discussion. They made themselves vulnerable, knowing that they could delve into sensitive areas without the other person shutting down or running away.

Most of his job was profiling, evaluating criminals, and helping agents deal with trauma. With Brennan and Booth, Sweets had helped two people work together, and they had created something much larger. They were a team. a _family—_better, still—a family with one of the highest rates of closed murder cases and subsequent convictions in the FBI. It confirmed one of Sweets' most deeply-held beliefs: love can save you. You can save through love.

* * *

******The End. **

******Thanks to all of you who read, subscribed, made this story a favorite or left a comment. It meant a lot to me. To those of you who haven't commented yet: it's your last chance! Please do.**


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